This message pertains to the Question and Answer (Q&A) Forum at the Central of Georgia Railway Historical Society (CGRHS) Web site.

On August 13, 2002 the server owner, greenspun.com, cleared out all the email alerts in the system. No reason was given for this action. I suspect other alerts might have been cleared earlier. If you are not getting the alerts that you expect, this is why.

The Q&A Forum is a resource that supports collaboration between people interested in the Central of Georgia Railway. Anyone in the community can post a question about any CofGa topic, or respond to a question asked by someone else.

An email alert is a message sent by the system when a message (a question or an answer) is added to the Forum. By setting an alert, you ensure that you always know about the latest posts.

I have attempted to restore previous alert email addresses from my resources. In the process I may have cast the net a little too broadly and swept in some email addresses for people who were not previously watching the CofGa Q&A Forum.

If you were not and are not interested in this discussion Forum, there is a link at the end of this announcement that you can use to disable all future alerts to your email address. I apologize in advance for disturbing you through my blunder.

Alerts can be generated instantly, as soon as a message is posted, or they can be sent periodically in digest format. I have no information about how alert frequency was previously configured, so each restored alert was set to “Instant (as soon as a posting is made).”

You can change the alert frequency to either “Daily,” “Monday and Thursday,” or “Weekly” by coming to the Q&A Forum from http://cofg.org. Alert control is at the bottom of the main Q&A page.

Who was added to the restored list?

The primary source of email addresses was a backup copy of the previous alert email list. This list did not contain alert frequency information.

I have backup copies of messages sent to info@cofg.org with CofGa questions that I added to the Forum. I did this so that the people who asked the questions can continue to track responses. Sometimes months can pass between responses to post, so alerts need to stay active for all messages.

Finally, I have backup copies of interesting personal emails and posts from lists like SERails, CofGModeler, etc, and my search script may have picked up your email address erroneously from one of these. Again, I apologize if this is the case.

To silence these alerts permanently at any time, just enter the URL below into a browser and you'll disable the alert that generated this email.

If you were a member of the Q&A Forum community, thanks again for sharing your Central enthusiasm and knowledge with the community.

Sincerely, Ron. Wright Web Site Manager The Central of Georgia Railway Historical Society http://cofg.org

-- Ron. Wright (rondywright@hotmail.com), August 21, 2002