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WebAIM List Update, Etiquette, and Contest

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From: Jared Smith
Date: Apr 17, 2012 10:50AM

WebAIM List Subscribers-

The WebAIM Discussion List has been active for 12 and a half years now
and is quickly approaching our 20,000th message. We estimate that
close to 18 million distinct e-mails have been distributed on the
list. When the list first started in 1999, WebAIM staff were simply
e-mailing each other, sometimes forcing conversations to try and
invite participation. We're thrilled with the success of this list
over the years. Someone has described it as the office water cooler of
web accessibility - a great place to hang out and chat about something
we're all passionate about.

To celebrate the success of the list, we thought we'd throw a little
contest. We've picked a number near 20,000. The subscriber that posts
the message coinciding with that number will win a WAVE T-shirt and
some other fine prizes. Please don't post unnecessarily in hope of
winning. The winning post will likely be sent in the next month or so.


We also take this opportunity to remind you of some mailing list best
practices. The online list archives are available online at
http://webaim.org/discussion/archives This is a valuable resources
that gets 10s of thousands of views each year. To keep the list and
archives usable, we kindly ask you to:

- Trim messages to only the relevant portion of the conversation you
are replying to. If there's any question, simply delete all previous
messages from your response. Most modern e-mail clients provide
threading that make it easy for users to get previous content without
it being repeated in every message. We recommend bottom posting (your
response would appear below the trimmed, quoted portion of the
previous message) or inline posting, rather than top posting (your
message appears at the top of the entire quoted messages you're
replying to).

- Keep Subject lines descriptive and succinct, just as you would web
page titles. If replying to a message, reply directly to that message
without modifying the Subject line. This keeps the mail thread in
tact. However, if you are a list digest subscriber, please modify the
subject line to be "Re: " and then the exact Subject of the message
you are replying to.

- Make sure your vacation auto-responders are NOT set to send to the
list. If you cannot customize this, please ensure that the word
"vacation" or "out of the office" appears in the Subject line and the
list will filter them out.

- Keep message signatures to a minimum. Your full page e-mail legal
disclaimer and confidentiality notice carries no legal weight anyway,
so please don't include it on list messages.

- Avoid attachments. The list allows them up to 100KB, but only send
them if necessary. Ensure any attachments are in an accessible and
readily supported format. Attachments will not appear in the list
archives.


Thank you all for your participation. We're looking forward to the
next 20,000 messages.

WebAIM Staff