1.) | What are these pages for? |
| These pages provide a web interface to the Advanced Squad Leader mailing list (ASLML). Notice that these pages are not the actual mailing list, but just an interface that allows people to enjoy the various discussions without receiving the hundreds of messages in their inboxes. The actual mailing list home page is http://www.greenepa.net/~pferraro/aslist.html . | |
2.) | Whoa! Back the truck up! What the heck is ASL? |
| ASL (Advanced Squad Leader) is a boardgame simulation of small-unit actions during World War II. It was originally produced by The Avalon Hill Game Company, which was purchased by Hasbro. It is currently being nurtured through Hasbro's permission by Multi-Man Publishing. For more information on ASL, see it's own FAQ. | |
3.) | How do I read messages? |
| That's the easy part. Just go to http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mhb/aslml. Click the button of the index you would like to see and then enter the username/password that is shown on the page. This takes you to an index where you can click on the messages you want to read. | |
4.) | How do I post messages? |
| You can post a message by sending email to advanced-sl@multimanpublishing.com . You can also click one this highlighted address or the ones on the index pages with a mailto-capable browser (e.g. Netscape, Internet Explorer.) Notice that these are not WWW message boards. Posts will not appear immediately, since they must pass through the mailing list and be mailed to all subscribers. | |
4a.) | But my message never makes it to the list? |
| The mailing list software automatically filters emails that are encoded in html. Please check that your browser or mailer is not sending html messages. | |
5.) | How do I reply to a message? |
|
This is the small problem with the interface, especially
if you're not using Netscape. The best way to reply
to a message is to select one of the "Reply to ..."
options just before the body of the message. You
must be using a mailto-capable browser and have it
configured to send mail properly.
If you're using Netscape then the subject line will be filled in for you. You can also select quote to display the message that you are replying to. You probably want to delete the headers and footers that will also get quoted. If you're not using Netscape then you'll need to cut-and-paste the subject line from the original message (prepending it with 'Re:'.) The reason for this is that there is no agreed upon standards for specifying the subject line or body of a message in the mailto tag. I am using Netscape's extensions to the mailto tag to achieve this for my browser of choice. | |
6.) | Why is there a username and password required if they're given at the front door? |
| This is to stop web-bots (automatic web surfers) that are designed to find email addresses to send unsolicited mail to. It's a slight inconvenience but should prevent mailing list subscribers from receiving unwanted email due to this page. Notice that you only have to provide the username/password once when you first start up your web browser. If you never quit it then you'll only ever have to do this once. |