On 3/6/07, Penny Brockman <> wrote:
I agree with another comment re: Needletail sightings - it may be a bore
for those in the know (reminds me of people who complain about standards
of TV - there is an OFF switch), but at the same time it may catch new
people who are unaware that Mike is collecting this data.
As the person who said "no" in response to the question "do these
sightings really need to go to the whole list", I'll pick up on this
point. I've been subscribing to this list for a few years although I
rarely post. For the longest time, I was puzzled by the swift sighting
reports as they don't seem like rare birds. (Well, Fork-tails do...)
Without any background or other information, it just seemed odd. With
the background information, it makes more sense. I think it's great a
national list is a useful to someone trying to collect data (however
anecdotal and inconsistent) on a national level. Now that I have the
specific address, I'll be happy to contribute sightings directly to
Mike Tarburton
As to "there is an OFF switch", not everyone has the same amount of
email to manage. For people who have to manage more than handful of
emails a day, it's quite helpful to be able to filter out messages
that are not of interest without having to manually delete or even
review messages. I just counted and I'm subscribed to nearly 30
mailing lists for personal and private reasons. If this sounds like a
lot, you don't work in the computer industry ;-) [Gmail is great for
storing mailing list subscriptions, by the way.] Some lists use
conventions, such as putting [OFF] in the subject of off-topic posts
or [ANN] for announcements of a commercial nature. Hence my suggestion
of a consistent string for swift sightings, such as WTNT, or what have
you. That should also make it easier for Mike Tarburton to extract the
sightings from the hundreds of messages sent to this list each
quarter. Another idea is to set an email to carbon copy in swift
sightings such as I'd be happy to add such an
email to one of my domains and have it automatically forward to Mike,
if that would be helpful. Regardless, anything consistent in the
message would let people who want to build a filter to discard swift
sightings.
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