Welcome to the Foxhunters OnLine email discussion list. This is a group of approximately 500 foxhunters around the world (with the heaviest concentration in North America) who are using the internet and email to discuss the sport of mounted foxhunting and related topics. It's a very diverse group with interests in all facets of the sport, and topics for discussion include such things as hound breeding, horse and tack care, hunting attire, fox habitat, etc. The amount of discussion here varies widely, depending on the season and people's moods. During busy times, you might receive an average of 30 messages per day on topics such as these; at other times, the traffic is much lighter. If you have something to contribute to the discussion, feel free to join in. If not, you're welcome to hang around and eavesdrop.
All subscribers here are expected to comply to some simple "netiquette" guidelines. If you've participated in other Internet email discussions or newsgroups, you've probably seen a lot of this before (and seen the chaos that sometimes results when people forget). If you're an internet veteran, you can probably skim most of this page and confirm that it's basically the same stuff you've seen before. If you're new to this medium of communications, please take the time to read this page thoroughly. Failure to follow these guidelines might annoy other subscribers. And if you persist, the list administrator may react in unpleasant ways.
Here are the basic commandments that you need to follow. As I said above, you may have already seen similar guidelines in other places. If so, and you understand them, great. If not, they are explained in more detail below, following the general instructions. You can click on any one of them to scroll directly to the explanation, or you can just scroll down to read them all.
If the above rules make sense to you, you're ready to play. If not, please either read the explanations below, or just go away.
If you're ready to play, the first step is to subscribe, if you have not already done so. To subscribe, send an email message to FOL–subscribe@Foxhunters.Org. The contents of the message are not important; it can say anything (or nothing). Any message sent to this address will result in a subscription request, using the email address from which your message was sent. Any text you include in the message will be blissfully ignored; your message is being read by a computer, not a human.
When your request is received, a confirmation message will be generated and sent to the address from which you sent the request. You must reply to that confirmation message before your subscription is complete. This confirmation guarantees that email sent to your address actually reaches you, and it provides verification that you really did want to subscribe and the request was not accidental or the result of a virus or spoof.
After replying to the confirmation message, you're on board. You will soon be receiving email from fellow foxhunters around the world, and you can send mail to them by addressing it to FOL@Foxhunters.Org, or by replying to one of the messages you receive. Messages you receive from FOL have a header directing replies back to the list, so in most cases, simply clicking reply will direct your reply to the entire list and not just an individual. When replying, please keep in mind the guidelines about trimming replies and changing the subject line if appropriate. (And if you intended to reply to just an individual and not the entire list, verify that your reply is addressed correctly before clicking send. Forgetting this is a common source of embarrassment for the sender and amusement for others).
New subscribers are encouraged, but not required, to post a brief "introductory" message telling a little bit about themselves, where they are, and maybe their hunt affiliation. Some hunts are a little concerned about having information about them posted here, so please be sure you're not going to incur your hunt's wrath before you publicize any information here.
New subscribers are also encouraged, but not required, to submit information about themselves and their hunts to the list directory. This directory is maintained on a voluntary basis by Christine Olson, in order to allow subscribers to know a little more about each other. Since some individuals and some hunts are a little wary about releasing information about themselves, you are not required to provide this information. To minimize privacy concerns, the directory is distributed only to those individuals who are listed in it, not to the entire group. So if you feel comfortable being listed in the directory, send a message to Christine Olson <olsonac@uic.edu> with the following information: name; title (MFH, whip, hunt member, etc.); email address, snail (postal) mail address; hunt affiliation; geographic location; type of hounds; type of hunt (live, drag, fox, coyote, etc.); type of horse; anything else you might like to add; (the only required fields are name, email address, and hunt affiliation). Christine will add you to the directory, which is only distributed to other subscribers who have submitted the same sort of information. If you don't want any information about you to be released, don't send Christine any info, and nobody will ever know you exist, and you won't get a copy of the directory either.
While it's the active participation of subscribers such as yourself that make this list as good as it is, "lurkers" who simply read the list and never contribute are perfectly welcome. If you have nothing to say, if you're bashful, if your hunt has imposed a gag order, you're welcome to hang out here and say nothing.
If you're new to foxhunting, or have questions about hunting topics that may have been previously discussed on this list, you might want to spend some time browsing the list archives. It would also be a good idea to take a look at some of the other pages listed on the FOL home page.
Up to a point, some digression is fun, and some leeway is allowed when a legitimate topic starts to stray. But don't start a discussion about something totally unrelated When people stray completely from the topic and post completely irrelevant stuff, other subscribers start to get a little testy. Not everybody here has the same interests outside of hunting, or the same amount of time to spend reading their email. Remember, when you post a message here, it's going to hundreds of people that you don't know, and that don't know you. All you know is that they're interested in foxhunting, or they wouldn't be here. They're not necessarily interested in any other topic that you suddenly feel an urge to discuss with total strangers. If you've got the time and interest to swap blonde jokes or cookie recipes with other people, that's fine, but this isn't the place for it.
This also applies to any "urgent" message you receive from well-meaning but uninformed friends, that requests you to pass it along to everybody you know. Everybody gets these things occasionally; if you haven't gotten one yet, you will. Sometimes it's a warning about kidney theft; or maybe a note urging you to contact your Congressman about the new Internet tax; or a warning that some product is dangerous; or a plea to raise money for a terminally ill child by forwarding the mail; or a warning about some new devastating computer virus. The first time you get one of these, you might think that this list is a good way to spread the word to as many people as possible. Don't Do It!!!! Most of these things are completely fictitious, and have nothing to do with the purpose of this list (foxhunting). Even if you think you're being helpful, spreading false information never helps anybody. In most cases, about 30 seconds with a search engine will find a web page documenting that whatever myth you have received is a hoax; send that link back with a nasty note to whoever sent the junk to you.
Also remember that this is not a computer diagnostic facility. Please do not send "test" messages just to see if you are receiving email properly; that's a nuisance to others. If you think you're having a problem, work it out with your Internet Service Provider, and see the FAQ for more information.
Depending on what email software that you're using, it's possible that whenever you click Reply, the entire text of the original message will be copied into your reply, and your message will be added above the original. If this is how your email software works, please delete all the repetitive stuff from your message before before sending it.
This may seem like nitpicking, but it's a major pain to those people who have slow connections, and/or subscribe in digest mode, and/or have to pay for their online time to download and page through a bunch of stuff they've already seen. To reinforce that it's not just me who doesn't like this, check out these pleas from your fellow subscribers.
Also consider the cumulative effect of this process. There's a lot of back and forth discussion here, and a message is likely to be replied to several times. If every reply includes the previous message, which includes the message before it, etc., the messages keep getting bigger and bigger as people keep replying, and pretty soon we're seeing huge messages with gobs of stuff that we've already seen several times before, with only a little bit of new material. The best place to stop that is before it starts.
Others have also pointed out that, when you do need to include some of a previous message in your reply to make your point, the quoted portion should come BEFORE
your reply, instead of after it. That makes sense for a couple of
reasons.
1) If people need to see a portion of the previous message to know
what you're talking about, they should probably see it first, instead
of reading your entire message, and then seeing the previous one and
saying "So THAT'S what he was talking about. If you expect them to read all the way to the end of your reply before they see what you're talking about, it probably doesn't need to be there.
2) Putting the quoted text before your reply before your message
makes you more likely to trim it appropriately, instead of leaving the entire mess forgotten at the end.
I realize this is contrary to the way some popular but brain-dead mail programs normally
work (such as those produced by Microsoft), but it really is more appropriate for a discussion list.
Disregarding this rule is the most common cause of subscribers not being allowed to post messages. A lot of leeway is granted in this area. An occasional slip will probably be tolerated (depending on how bad it is). And as long as you're making a good faith effort to comply, nobody is going to quibble over whether you included one or two lines more than necessary. It's just those who seem to never make any effort at all to clean up their messages who will get muzzled.
Some people spend all day in front of their computers, and it is easy (maybe too easy) to fire off an instant response to a message, which frequently leads to a rapid-fire back-and-forth chain of messages between two or more subscribers. If you are one of these people, please remember that your chitchat is piling up in the mailbozes of others who are out walking hounds, cleaning kennels, exercising horses, etc. When they finally collapse in front of their computer in the evening with a well-deserved cold drink, looking forward to some stimulating foxhunting discussion, they may not be thrilled to see 100 or more messages between a couple of people exchanging witty but pointless remarks. PLEASE be considerate of your fellow subscribers. Many who could have much to contribute to this discussion give up after being swamped with some of these chat marathons.
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