KRNet "Basic" Instructions, and more importantly, the <b>"LIST RULES" </b>(see KRNetiquette below)


KRnet "Basic" Information


Join the KRnet email list by sending an email to krnet-owner@list.krnet.org. Please include your name, address, phone number, and a sentence or two on why you'd like to join the list. This personal information will go no further than us, Mark Langford and John Bouyea, the list owners and moderators. We request this information to filter out the scammers, spammers, and trolls who frequent other lists to harvest email addresses and take pot-shots at others for sport. Membership to the list is not automatic...it requires this information first, so we can verify who you are and why you'd like to be on the list. We keep it civil on this list, so please send that info if you'd like to join.

Once subscribed, you can visit http://list.krnet.org/mailman/listinfo/krnet_list.krnet.org to change your password or other options. If you don't know your password, you can change it there, or change to "digest" mode (whereby you get each days messages all rolled into one email, rather than each one individually), unsubscribe, and that sort of thing. Don't mess with things you don't understand though, because I know who will have to figure it out and fix it in the end!

Please utilize the KRNet "Mail Archive" search engine (run by John Bouyea) at https://www.mail-archive.com/krnet@list.krnet.org/. to check for immediate answers to your questions. This search engine has every email posted to KRnet since 2003, so whatever you're looking for, it's probably there! Then AFTER you've read 148 posts on the subject, you'll be prepared to ask pointed, specific questions on KRnet. Seasoned subscribers get tired of answering the same old questions, so such simple ones often go unanswered. But when you post a thoughtful, insightful question, you're more likely to get an answer, or maybe even spark a helpful debate.

  • KRnet is completely FREE, and no presonal information is gathered, collected, or sold, period. I ask nothing in return, other than "please follow the rules". I don't ask for contributions, because I do this to further the KR (and Experimental Aviation) cause. It's the least I can do to pay back the pleasure this hobby has given me. It also keeps me "straight"...I'm only going to tell you the truth, not slant it for any monetary or other personal reason. I play no favorites, I just call it like I see it.

  • Before posting messages to the KRnet list, please read and understand the list rules presented below, under the heading of "KRNetiquette".
  • After joining the list, you may post messages to the list by sending email to krnet@list.krnet.org. You must be a member to post.

  • To change your options, such as switching to the DIGEST version, visit http://list.krnet.org/mailman/listinfo/krnet_list.krnet.org .

  • To UNsubscribe, also visit http://list.krnet.org/mailman/listinfo/krnet_list.krnet.org , and go to the bottom, or simply send an email message to krnet-leave@list.krnet.org.

    KRNetiquette

    We have a few folks who feel compelled to comment on just about every post made, and I can only be thankful that all 600 of us don't do that, or we'd be wading through several thousand emails a day! Please be considerate of your fellow KRNetHeads. A few of us would do well to heed the following advice:

    1) Think long and hard before you publicly flame somebody on this list. This list may not be like others you've been on. We don't do that here, period. If you have a personal problem with another lister, you need to address it off the list and spare the rest of us your angst. If you disagree with something somebody else posted, you can disagree in a nice manner without getting all bent out of shape. Just point out your side of the discussion and let others be the judge. Public flaming and superfluous bad language will not be tolerated.

    2) When replying to a post, delete everything except one or two key sentences from the previous post. It's really ridiculous to have to search thru 3 or 4 pages of stuff to find down at the bottom where some clown wrote "me too". Carrying all that useless baggage around from previous posts also gives people fits when searching the archives later, as they end up getting 10 hits for the same message.

    3) Conversely, at least put SOMETHING in the post to remind us what you're replying to. A post like "yeah, that's how I did mine and it works great" doesn't mean a thing if you don't know what the guy's talking about, so please cut and paste some of what you're replying to above your comments, and consider renaming the post if it's appropriate.

    4) Carefully consider whether or not you even need to reply to a post. Saying "me too", or "I don't know" doesn't contribute to the thread, it just makes the list more bothersome. If you don't know what you're talking about, maybe you should be listening, rather than talking. There are FEW people who know everything about everything. Try to stick to things you KNOW about, and let others answer the rest. A corollary to this is if you find yourself making more than five posts in a single day, you probably need to "stifle yourself"!

    5) Try to write "keeper" posts if you're the expert on something. Cover the whole issue, answer all possible questions, address both sides of an issue, and make it a post that others will want to save or print out and keep. Those are the gems that we all search for on KRNet.

    6) Put your name and email address in your signature to make emailing others "offnet" easier. If we all had our email addresses at the bottom of our posts, it would be far easier to "email direct". If it's blue just click on it, if it's not, cut it and paste it into the "To" box. If throwing your email address out on the internet makes you nervous (and it should), camoflage it a little by replacing the @ symbol with "at", or something similar, so that bot crawlers won't know what to do with it.

    7) If you don't have anything substantial to say, please don't post anything. This is a KR list, and as such, really needs to stay focused on KRs, or at least airplanes. With over 600 people on the list, if we all decided to say something every day we'd have a real problem. Ask yourself "do 600 people really need to see this, or are 600 people going to be annoyed by this?" Personally, my time is pretty precious to me, and I hate to waste it reading inane email. And is it something that you could find somewhere else? Also, this is NOT Facebook. KRnet is not the place for airing political greivances, complaining about social issues, or floating conspiracy theories. This is not the place for it,a and is grounds for "moderation" (you can no longer post to the list), or worse.

    8) Don't send enclosed files (except small photos) directly to the list. The total size limit of a post is 250k (that's text plus enclosures). Also, enclosures are famous for carrying viruses, which we could all do without. I usually delete messages with enclosures immediately, unless I'm expecting something from that person. I don't have three days to rebuild my computer "for fun". And by all means, arm yourself with an anti-virus program such as Malwarebytes. It's free and it works better than most. There are other FREE antivirus programs out there. GET ONE!

    9) If you have something you want to share, specify that you want replies to go offline. It's nice to say "hey, I've got the holy grail on thingamajigs, anybody want it?", but when 15 people reply online that they want it it gets kinda painful wading thru all of those posts for nothing. A gentle reminder to "reply offline" and furnishing your email address will be a big help. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that just about everybody would like to know more about something helpful, just post it and get it over with.

    10) Do not advertise commercial products to this list. It's OK to let folks know there's a new service or a new business, but point them to web site. We don't need a bunch of advertising here. Personal testimonials as to a product's usefulness are welcome anytime, as long as it's not YOUR product. Advertising and selling KRs, KR parts, or something that can be used on one IS permissible anytime, however. Just don't go overboard if it's your business you're "selling".

    11) Try not to take things personally. We're all here to help each other. There are usually several ways to take comments. Always try to pick the "nicest" interpretation, rather than trying to read animousity into a post. It's a lot easier to just ignore a snide comment and let it slide. Try to avoid "having the last word".

    12) It's OK to interject some personality into emails, just make a contribution while you're at it. I like to let other KRNetters know who I am and what my interests are, but I try to tack that sort of stuff to the bottom of a post in which I've made some sort of contribution to the cause.

    13) Keep personal stuff offline. Finding that some other KRNetter is from your neck of the woods isn't a good enough reason to bother us all with your efforts to strike up an acquaintance. Email him direct, rather than to the list, or if he's and doesn't have his email address in his "signature", ask online to be contacted offline...at YOUR email address.

    14) Do not forward "chain mail" or ANYTHING that urges the sender to "send this to everyone in your address book", or "forward to all your friends". These are almost always either hoaxes, viruses, or just plain don't have any place on KRnet. This includes messages dealing with politics, nationalism, conspiracy theories, or religion. There are plenty of email lists where you can flood your email inbox with warm, touchy-feely messages from the heart, complain about your pet peeve of the day, or score political points for your candidate. KRNet is NOT going to become one of them! I have already thrown one of my best friends off the list for doing this, mainly because he started the sentence with "I'll probably get thrown off the list for this...". He was espousing his political view...exactly the same as mine, but the rules are the rules, and even I abide by them. Don't throw down the gauntlet, especially when you know better!

    15) Change the subject if the thread starts to deviate from the original intent. This makes searching the archive much more productive and far less time-consuming for future builders who are in search of information.

    16) Please read ALL of your messages before replying to ANY of them, espescially for you "digest" readers. Why? Because much of the time, your reply will have already been answered by somebody else (or lots of people), and your reply may just be redundant, or even worse, already disproved by somebody that knows more about it than you do!

    17) The best way to send photos to the list is to put them on a website somewhere else and send the link to the list. If that's over your head or you only have one or two, you can send them direct to the list, as long as the total size doesn't not exceed approximately 200kB (a total of 250kB, but your text and "encoding" will cost you some of that). That's likely only one or two pictures. This means you will likely have to shrink it down to something reasonable like 800x600, AND compress the image by about 50% using something like IRFANVIEW, a free image processor available online. If it's oversize you'll get a message that the moderator is considering it, but the same guy that wrote this is the moderator, so you can guess what the answer is. If you can't find an image processor and can't post it online and send a link, you likely should not be building an airplane either. It's really not that tough. I've posted a LOT of 70k images on the list and on my website that are quite acceptable. Surely you can do it with three times that allotment. For those who take photos with cell phones and want to post them, first send the photo to yourself, compress it while sending (choose "small" or "medium), and THEN post the resulting image. It's that easy. Or you can post all the photos you want to somewhere like DropBox, and then send the link to folks on KRnet. Be advised though, the day will come when DropBox will croak, but your email will be on your computer as long as you keep it. Be advised that PhotoBucket is definitely not where you want to put your images, as they are now blurring out all photos that have accounts that are over their limits, making millions of very helpful photos (especially when it comes to car repair) completely useless. This kind of thing is what happens when you post your photos on somebody else's server. A lot of builder's logs have evaporated overnight this way too.

    18) Those who violate these suggestions may find themselves wondering why they don't get KRNet mail anymore. I reserve the right to throw anybody overboard that I see fit...

    Mark Langford, KRnet owner/administrator/moderator

  • Every couple of days I get a message saying somebody can't post to the list, but are receiving them just fine. There are several possible causes:

    1) You just set up a "new" computer and the default is "normally" to send all email as HTML. The server rejects these, but doesn't bother to notify you, so you simply don't get through. The remedy is to go into your "tools", "options", and "send" (in Outlook or other "email client") and change your "mail sending format" to "plain text". That'll fix it.

    2) You just set up a "new computer" and you incorrectly typed your email address in the "reply to" field while setting up your email. This will lead to all kind of problems, but you won't be able to post because your reply-to address doesn't match the address from which you're subscribed, so it fails. Best policy is to leave the "reply to" field blank. The only folks that need that are spammers or others who don't want you to know how to reply to their messages.

    3) You're trying to post from work or some other email account from which you are not subscribed. The list should inform you that you are not a member of the list, and that should be your first clue. Some people get irrate, convinced that their God-given right to post has been revoked by the moderator jerk, and I get nasty emails. The easy answer is to join from both accounts (send a message to krnet-join@list.krnet.org from the "excluded" account, and set one of them to receive no posts, so you don't get them twice.

    4)One more reason would be if your ISP is stupid like Netzero, and tells you your email address is "somethingorother@somewhere.COM", but your return address is actually "somethingorother@somewhere.NET" instead. Same problem as number 3...your subscribed address needs to match your reply-to address, or it's not gonna work.

    5) If you suddenly stop receiving email from the list entirely, and you've done nothing stupid with your email accounts, the first place to look is your ISP's spam filter. That'll kill everything from the list in a heartbeat. It's happened to me, and I'm the list owner.


    Special Instructions for Yahoo, AOL and other email clients

    First off, Yahoo and other "free" email adresses are the number one complainers about their messages from KRnet suddenly stopping. I'm often accused of throwing them off the list, but that's almost never the case (when I throw somebody off (maybe every year or two, you'll get an earful from me first!). Apparently Yahoo and others brand KRnet email as spam, and just kill it before it every leaves there. You'll have to work with them on that, but rarely do I hear of anybody getting this resolved, so my recommendation is simply get a gmail email address. Of course all of your info will now be sucked into the Google cloud, but your provate info is probably there already!

    AOL and some other ISPs attempt to control spam through user actions, as well as some automatic controls. Unfortunately, this can create serious complications for those on mailing lists. KRNet suffers from both kinds of actions.

    One thing AOL does is if it sees a large number of "undeliverable mail" coming in from a certain domain (such as list.krnet.org), it will decide that it must be spam, rather than private email from individuals, and start blocking that domain. There is no amount of common-sense pleading that will get your domain taken off that list once it is added, so the smart thing to do is not get there in the first place. This is exactly why our old list at mailinglists.com would not deliver mail to AOL subscribers.

    The "mailman" software has certain features set up as defaults, including one that will suspend email to a list subscriber if it starts getting "undeliverable mail" messages returned. If it gets a certain number of those within a specific amount of time, it will suspend that email address for a while in order to give the problem a chance to get cleared up. It will send several messages over the period of a week notifying the subscriber that his subscription has been disabled, and that he needs to go to visit http://list.krnet.org/listinfo/krnet to re-enable his subscription. If the situation persists, the system will automatically unsubscribe the guy, and if that's the case, he may be unsubscribed and will never have gotten the message telling him that he's been thrown off the list. In that case, your first clue is that you haven't gotten email from KRnet for several days. When you figure that out, just go re-subscribe. No biggie. But take the situation as a clue that your ISP (not necessarily AOL) is a little flaky around the edges and has a tendency to go up and down, and occasionally cannot be found to deliver mail to. I've seen 30 AOL users be unsubscribed at the same time due to undeliverable mail problems.

    Another problem is the "mail controls" that allow the user to block messages from certain senders. It's all too easy to select a bunch of spam and accidently include a message from another KRNet subscriber. After you do that, every message that the other guy sends to the group will generate a message that looks like: "Your mail to the following recipients could not be delivered because they are not accepting mail from somebodyoranother@somewhere.com ", with some AOL member's handle underneath. The problem with these is that first of all, you no longer get messages from the guy and don't even know it, AND everytime this happens, the system sends ME a message that the mail didn't go through because you screwed up and added a KRNetter to your blocked sender list! This gets really painful after you've gotten about 20 of these in a day! So once you've done it, how do you fix it? See below...


    To access AOL's "mail controls", click on the blue "MAIL" header to pop down the menu shown here, and choose "MAIL CONTROLS". The following box will appear. Next click on "People and Places" to get the screen shown below.


    Once here, you can see what choices you've made, and a list is displayed of the people who you've blocked. Simply find the guy that you've blocked, and remove his name from the list, and don't let it happen again!!!

    NETZERO users:
    I've had several requests over the last few months to fix problems with people who have accounts with "netzero" domain names (starting with the infamous "JoSandt" character). What happens is that they sign up using their email address of somethingorother@netzero.com, but get a message like "sorry, but you have to be a member of the list to post to it". That's because netzero puts your RETURN address in as somethingorother@netzero.NET , and those are two different people as far as the rest of the world is concerned. The cure is that you have to subscribe from BOTH email accounts, and then go into your account (at
    http://list.krnet.org/listinfo/krnet and disable the mail from one of them (I guess the .com one would make sense) so you don't get two copies of every message. You need to know your password, which was in the "welcome to the list" message that you got on day one, or you can get a reminder at the bottom of that same link (which is also printed at the bottom of every message that goes to the lists).

    If you are having problems that you can't figure out by yourself, email the list administrator (Mark Langford at krnet-owner@list.krnet.org, but I'd appreciate it if you'd try to fix it yourself first.


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