Documentation

Dvaita List Issues

Table of Contents

1. History & Introduction
2. Privacy Policy
3. Posting Guidelines
4. Making Queries
5. Netiquette
6. How to Subscribe
7. Frequently Asked Questions

History & Introduction

The Dvaita List was started with nine subscribers on January 29, 1996 (Madhva Navami), with the objective of being a base of support for the Dvaita Home Page, then in its infancy. It has changed in many ways since that time, not least of all in its size, but its primary purpose remains, to this day, to act as a forum of discussion in support of the Dvaita websites. That is the reason it is tightly integrated with the Dvaita websites, unlike many other forums which are only loosely, if at all, tied to any websites.

The Dvaita List is a closed, unmoderated forum for discussion of the doctrine of Srî Madhvâcharya, who is also known as Srimad Ananda Tîrtha.

“Closed” means that only subscribers may post; “unmoderated” means that anything a subscriber sends will reach everyone as fast as the Net will allow, without having to be approved by a moderator.

This lack of moderation however does not apply to all, given our desire to maintain quality and decorum on the list. (See our note at How to Subscribe in this regard.) We specifically reserve the right to enforce moderation upon individual subscribers, or upon all of the List, at our discretion. We likewise reserve the right to remove—without warning or explanation—any subscriber who violates the List policy (especially on Netiquette).

Privacy Policy

The subscriber list for the Dvaita List is never sold, shared, swapped, or otherwise made available to anyone for any reason; requests for the data (e.g., for the stated purpose of compiling lists of Mâdhva people on the Net) are turned down or ignored entirely. Subscribers necessarily reveal their identities if they post, but if a subscriber wishes to remain concealed and does not post, no one will know of his presence on the List. Subscribers are also only sent List postings (including administrative notices), but are not otherwise contacted or solicited by even the administrators themselves.

This privacy policy is also applicable to our announcement list.

Posting Guidelines

1. Only plain-text (ASCII) postings are permitted. MIME/HTML/Rich-Text formatting of a message (which is the default on many e-mail clients) causes it to be discarded by the server. This is the single most frequent reason for postings not to appear.
2. Fund-raising appeals (even for worthy causes), product advertisements, personals, matrimonials, political or social controversies, and the like are firmly disallowed.
3. File attachments of any kind are not allowed, and messages with them are discarded by the server.
4. Always keep a copy of your postings—the admins cannot help with lost postings.
5. There is a size limit of 40,000 bytes on List postings—excluding headers, this comes to about 37 KB of text in the message body.
6. Messages must be explicitly sent to the List posting address (i.e., that address must appear in the To: or CC: header fields); those that are bcc'd are rejected by the server as spam. Likewise, messages that are cc'd to several addresses are rejected as spam.
7. AVOID USING ALL CAPS, stylized misspellings (“ur,” “nite,” “l8r,” etc.), and street slang—they bring no discernible benefit, and make the writing hard to read.
8. Do not send a posting more than once. Even if you have not received the posting, wait a minimum of 24 hours, then check the archive as well as your inbox, before resending.

Making Queries

Queries are strongly discouraged. You may find this a surprising attitude, but it has been our experience that allowing queries freely runs down the quality of the List and increases the noise. The List is not a question-answering service, and we look with considerable disfavor upon anyone who treats it as such. For queries, we suggest the following:

1. Try doing a search on dvaita.in to see if information you are looking for has been posted in the past.
2. Look for other sources of information, such as books, other websites, and search engines.
3. If you do post a query, after having done the previous, mention what you found from these other sources, and what else you are looking for. Indicate clearly that your posting is a query by using the prefix “Query,” “Question,” or just “Q” in the subject of your message. (In other words, if you are making a query about the Yukti-Mallikâ your subject should be “Query: Yukti-Mallika,” not just “Yukti-Mallika.”) Doing this is a courteous indicator to other subscribers that the posting is a query, rather than one that gives information on the topic.

Netiquette

Every posting made to the List should have some positive, useful content that makes it worth reading. Bare opinions, one-line comments, personal messages, and the like are obviously ruled out for this reason.

The following general rules apply:

1. Remove the footer (the one that gives the posting address and the URL of the List, and says "Remove this footer from followups") from the bottom of the previous posting, before sending a reply. (Also see #4.)
2. Do not cross-post/multiple-post to the List. If something has been posted or is to be posted on any other forum, including websites, do not post it on the Dvaita List.
3. Do not post followups on the List to messages that appeared elsewhere, or otherwise port a discussion already underway from elsewhere into the Dvaita List.
4. Do not quote a previous posting entirely or unnecessarily. Trim the quoted portion to the bare minimum necessary. (Hence #1.)
5. Do not send personal messages to the List, or reply to a List posting if your reply is meant for the poster only.
6. Do not quote personal messages (without the explicit permission of the sender), or reply to personal messages, on the List.
7. Do not address people by name (even to convey compliments), especially so in the subject.
8. If something said in a List posting is offensive or excites your passion in some other way, take a timeout and think calmly and carefully before responding. That will reduce the risk of a rash response that you may regret later.
9. Do not send a message to the list if your intention is to reach the list administrators.

How to Subscribe

The Dvaita List can be subscribed to, or unsubscribed from, using its web page. List archives are also linked from that page.

NB: Addresses are subscribed to the digest form by default (unless the non-digest form is explicitly chosen), and all first-time subscribers are initially subject to moderation, meaning their postings do not appear until approved by a moderator. (We have had to adopt this policy given repeated instances of new subscribers making inappropriate postings.) Later on, as a subscriber's reputation is built up with a history of good postings, moderation is removed. (This is also done initially if a subscriber is re-joining the list after an absence, or if a second address is being added for an existing subscriber who is not subject to moderation.)

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why did I receive a notice from you saying that my posting was disallowed?

   If you attempted a posting and received an automatic notice from the dvaita.info mailing list server saying:
   
   The message's content type was explicitly disallowed
   
   —this means that your posting used MIME/HTML/Rich-Text formatting, which is rejected by the server automatically (see our Posting Guidelines above). The server does not perform a semantic check of contents the way a human would, and re-posting in plain text format should solve the problem. Note that Rich Text formatting is the default on many mail clients. (If you can change fonts, colors, highlights, etc., then your messages are in Rich Text.)

2. I unsubscribed from the List a while ago, but I'm still getting postings! Why?

   You may not have unsubscribed correctly (if you did not receive an unsubscribe notice, then you did not). Otherwise, messages sent before the unsubscribe was processed are being delivered to you late, or you may have been subscribed multiple times, possibly with different addresses.

3. I was subscribed, but now suddenly I am not receiving postings any more.

   The list server automatically disables the subscription of any dvaita-list member whose address rejects postings 20 times or more, with the count being halted and reset to 0 if there is a period of 7 consecutive days with no bounce. It then sends three automatic notices to each offending address (the notices are sent three days apart, i.e., over a period of six days). If the member does not re-activate the subscription in the manner suggested in the notice, the address is then automatically deleted. The member must then re-subscribe as initially.
   
   Bounce unsubscriptions most often happen when people leave stale addresses (e.g., from former jobs) subscribed, but they can also happen if an account mailbox is full (e.g., because the owner is on vacation), or if there is some problem with your local system rejecting mail (whether all mail, or just dvaita-list mail).

4. I would like to be able to post from more than one account, while receiving postings at only one. Is this possible?

   Yes, but we do this only in exceptional cases for subscribers whose contributions are valued. Send e-mail to the administrators (do not post!) with such a request.

5. My postings to the Dvaita List never seem to make it. Why?

   Most probably because your mail client (e.g., Outlook) sends mail in HTML/Rich-Text format rather than as plain-text.
   The mail server also gets confused if a message uses dashed lines (lines with strings of hyphens -------) and rejects it as using MIME. Avoid using these.