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Analog 5.91beta1: Mailing lists
I welcome mail about analog, both praise and bug reports! I and others are
also usually happy to help people who have trouble with analog: it helps me
to find bugs, and know where the documentation is unclear.
There are four mailing lists for analog.
- analog-announce
- Announcements about analog. I post to this when there are new versions,
for example. Only gets a few messages a year.
- analog-help
- Getting help with analog from experienced users. This is the place to go
if you have trouble setting up or configuring the program. Usually you will
get a swift reply. You have to subscribe to the list before you can send a
message. You can also read this list as
a forum (but not post) or as a newsgroup.
- analog-help-digest
- This is the same as the analog-help list, except that you get
one long message per day instead of lots of individual ones.
- analog-author
- This just goes to me. Use for private comments, or other things that would
not be suitable for the analog-help list. Don't use this address
for user support questions: I'll just redirect you to analog-help.
You may or may not get a swift reply, depending how busy I am with other
things.
There is also an independent
Japanese analog mailing list. And
there are also companies offering support for analog on a commercial basis:
you can find a list of them on the analog home
page.
To subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) any of the mailing lists, fill in the
appropriate form at
http://lists.isite.net/. So that no-one
else can subscribe you, you'll receive a mail which you have to reply to to
confirm your subscription. You'll then get all the messages from the list.
Alternatively, you can read the groups as
newsgroups.
If you want to get help with analog, please check the following
simple things first. (For articles on how to ask in such a way that you'll get
a useful answer, I recommend
Eric Raymond's How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
and Simon Tatham's How to Report Bugs Effectively.)
- Read the FAQ. Maybe I've answered your question
already. If I have, I'll just direct you to the FAQ, not answer it
again.
- If analog produced some error messages when it ran, they probably
indicate what went wrong. Read the section on
Errors and warnings.
- If your question is "Will this command have that effect?", why
not try it and see!
- If you think you've found a bug, read the
list of
known bugs at my site, to see if your bug is already known about.
- Read the other relevant pages of the Readme, particularly the sections
on Starting to use analog and
Customising analog. You may also
find the index useful. We don't appreciate people
who are too lazy to read the documentation. (If the documentation is
unclear, or the relevant paragraph is too well hidden, then that's a
different matter. Of course I want to know about that.)
- Have a look in the web archives of the
mailing list to see if your question has already been answered there.
- If analog isn't doing what you thought you asked it to, then run it with
the SETTINGS ON
configuration
command, and see what options it thinks it's meant to be using.
I'm sorry to be so fussy, but a lot of the mail on the list really needn't
have been sent at all, and just wastes the time of everybody on the list. As
I say, I really do welcome genuine mail.
If you still need help, subscribe to the to the analog-help mailing list using
the form at
http://lists.isite.net/listgate/ANALOG-HELP/subscribe.html,
and then send your mail to analog-help@lists.isite.net.
Please do the following when you send mail to the list.
- Describe exactly what you did, what you expected, and what the computer
did. Include the exact text of any error messages, not a
précis.
- Mention which version of analog you are using, on which operating
system.
- Although you should obey the first two points, you should also try and
send a short message. Most people don't bother to read long messages.
- Give your mail a subject line which indicates immediately what aspect of
analog it is about. (This is useful for the archives).
- Do not send long files or attachments unless you're
asked to. We do not want to see your configuration file, your header
file, your output file, or any logfile over 10 lines long. They are
almost always useless to us. And anyway, excessively long messages will
be rejected by the mailing list server.
If you want to send a private message to me, you can send it to me at
analog-author@lists.isite.net.
Please don't use this address for user support questions: I don't have time to
answer them, and I'll just redirect you to the analog-help list.
There are several web archives of
the analog-help list. You can find them at these places:
You can also find an archive of the analog-announce list at
If you prefer Usenet format, you can also read the groups as newsgroups at
Many thanks to ISite for providing these
mailing lists for me, to GMane for the
mail-to-news gateways, and to all those who provide list archives.
Go to the analog home page.
Stephen Turner
23 August 2003
Need help with analog? Use the analog-help
mailing list.
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