1. Introduction and Purpose

Grizzly Peak Cyclists maintains a discussion forum, which is open only to GPC members. Its name is GPC-talk at grizz dot org. Its purpose is to allow members to share information and exchange messages with each other. Posts may be on a variety of subjects including anything related to club business, bicycling, bicycle advocacy, or any other subject that the poster feels may be of interest to a significant number of other GPC members.

Please consider carefully the last part of the preceding sentence. It is intended to encourage communication, but it is not intended to be license to post anything. If your post is not likely to be of interest to a significantly larger percentage of GPC members than of other groups such as computer users or the general public, then it probably should not be on this forum.

As of September 2021, about 450 people (approximately 60% of the club members) are subscribed to the forum.

2. Joining the GPC-talk Discussion Forum

If you are a GPC member and wish to join the GPC-talk forum, send a subscription request with your name and email address to ListManager at grizz dot org. After the list manager verifies your membership in the club, you will receive an email confirmation request. After you respond to that, you will be subscribed.

3. Creating an Account

In order to be able to manage your new subscription, you should now create an account. You need to do this only once. Your account will work for multiple GPC forums. Alternatively, if you have a GitHub, GitLab, Google(Gmail), or LinkedIn account with your subscribed email address, you can go to the Sign In page and click the appropriate button to automatically create your account and log in. Once you log in to your new account, you will be able to view the forums in your browser and set various global and list-specific configuration options. The options are explained in the GNU Mailman 3 - List Member Manual. It is also possible to change a few configuration options by email. To get a list, send a blank e-mail with subject "help" to GPC-talk-request at grizz dot org.

4. Accessing the GPC-talk Forum

There are several different ways to participate in the forum. Which one works best for you may depend on your preferred email client, how often you plan to post to the forum, and how much effort you are willing to put into optimizing your setup.

1. Web Forum

   This is the preferred method to participate in any of our discussion forums. You can view and post to the GPC-talk forum in your web browser by clicking on the button at the top of this page. You will need to log in when requested, using the account you set up per section 3 above. After login, you may want to bookmark the page for future use.

   This method has several advantages including ease of use, keeping discussion threads together, and eliminating excessive quoting of prior messages. Maybe the best part though, is you can fully review and participate in the discussions without receiving any email messages. Just login to your account and disable email delivery (set Delivery status to Disabled).

2. Email

   You can also participate in the discussion forum by email, using your preferred email client. Some email clients work better than others and some have better tools for managing the incoming messages. When you initially subscribe to the forum, email delivery is enabled by default. You will begin receiving email messages, and you can post to the forum by sending an e-mail from your subscribed address to GPC-talk at grizz dot org.

   Due to the volume of messages you may prefer to configure your email service to filter the forum messages into a separate folder (or label), and bypass your inbox. Otherwise, the GPC-talk messages may make it difficult to focus on your more important email. We have a step-by-step procedure for Gmail, but other services will be similar.

   Common problems with the email method of interacting with the forum include broken threads, long messages due to quoting previous posts, and a swamped inbox for email programs that are not configured to filter forum messages.

3. Email Digest

   On busy days a dozen or more messages may be sent to the forum. A daily digest version is available for people who wish to receive fewer mail messages. If you subscribe to the digest, then instead of receiving individual messages throughout the day as other members post them, you will receive a single message each morning that contains the previous day's postings. There is also an option to have your digest sent with the individual messages as attachments. If your e-mail client supports attachments, we suggest you set the "Delivery mode" option to "Mime digests".

   Although the digest method reduces the number of messages in your inbox without having to configure filtering for your email service, it has some drawbacks, not just for the digest user but for other forum subscribers. It doesn't work very well if you intend to post messages to the forum. Your posts will be based on messages from the previous day. Often the issue has already been resolved and you will be repeating information that someone else has already posted. Digest users sometimes make the mistake of including the entire digest in their replies, which makes it hard to follow topics and sometimes causes multiple digests to be sent per day.

5. Other Forums

The club also maintains other discussion forums for various purposes.

6. Contact Information

1. Problems. If you have problems with any of the above, or with receiving messages from the forum, or with posting messages to it, contact the list manager at ListManager at grizz dot org.
2. Abuse. If you believe that the forum has been used inappropriately, do not post that view to the forum. Instead, send a message to ListAbuse at grizz dot org. This mail is routed to the list manager and to certain other club officers.

7. Archives

The Web Forum described above also serves as an archive of previous posts and is accessible only by subscribers for privacy reasons.

Be aware that messages you post may be archived somewhere in perpetuity -- be cautious about posting language or opinions you wouldn't want your children or grandchildren to trace back to you!

8. Appropriate Use

The forum is unmoderated, which means that in individual-message mode there is no a priori censorship of messages for content. It also means that opinions posted on the forum may occasionally be distasteful to some. That being said:

1. Postings to the forum should not be deliberately offensive or inflammatory, nor violate GPC's Code of Conduct or principles of nondiscrimination and nonharassment as set forth in Article XV of the GPC Bylaws, which states: "The Grizzly Peak Cyclists prohibits discrimination and harassment on the basis of of race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, citizenship, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, or age (over 18) in its functions and activities."
2. To make posts shorter and easier to read, postings should not include:
   • long excerpts or quotations from previous postings (quoting a few relevant sentences is ok); nor
   • long verbatim extracts of material available elsewhere on the web (instead, post a short summary and the web address so that interested people may read it); nor
   • non-plain text attachments of any length (instead, post instructions on how to access the item in question). Attachments other than plain text will be automatically removed from posted messages.
3. Postings should not include copyrighted material or the contents of off-list email without permission from the copyright holder or author.

9. Procedure in Case of Inappropriate Use

The decision on whether a post is inappropriate may be made by the list abuse manager. If the list abuse manager believes that a posting is sufficiently inappropriate, the list abuse manager will contact the poster (with the list manager and board included), inform him or her of this procedure and the reasons, and warn him or her to refrain from making further such postings. The list abuse manager may also suppress individual messages that he or she considers inappropriate from the digest and the web forum archives.

If you believe a posting, or series of postings, to be sufficiently inappropriate to require action, you may make your view known to the list abuse manager and the list manager by mailing to ListAbuse at grizz dot org -- see above.

If a poster continues to make postings that are deemed inappropriate after being formally warned by the list abuse manager, then he or she may be removed from the GPC-talk forum for a period of three months.

If, after being reinstated to the forum, a poster persists in posting inappropriate messages, the list abuse manager may remove him or her from the GPC-talk forum permanently.

Following any warning or three-month removal, the poster's GPC-talk postings will be moderated for one month. Inappropriate postings caught during moderation or emails to the list manager or list abuse manager may be grounds for warning, three-month removal, or permanent removal.

In the event that a member disagrees with a decision by the list abuse manager regarding the appropriateness of one or more postings to the forum, the member may appeal to the board of directors (e-mail Board at grizz dot org). The board will vote on the case and may override the list abuse manager by majority vote.

If a poster's behavior is especially egregious, the board may vote to immediately remove the poster permanently--skipping the warning and three-month removal. For this to happen, the vote must be unanimous. If the poster is a board member, he or she may not participate in the vote.

10. More Forum Features

Turning off email delivery. When you go out of town, it is considerate to avoid sending auto-reply (vacation responder) messages to the forum (e.g., "I'm out of town; I'll reply when I return"). To avoid auto-reply, you can temporarily change to "delivery disabled" mode. While in "delivery disabled" mode, you will not receive email messages (either digest or individual mode), but you can still post messages to the forum. Later, you can log in and change your delivery method again. If you are using Gmail or an other compliant responder, then this is not necessary for this purpose. Standards compliant vacation responders will not reply to messages from a list that you are subscribed to.

There are other reasons you may wish to suspend email delivery for a shorter or longer time. I.e., you may wish to only read and reply to forum posts via the web forum interface.

The turn off email delivery, go to your subscription preferences page and set "Delivery status" to "Disabled".

Filtering. Several filters are automatically applied to all posts. These may result in your post being rejected or held for approval. No filtering is done based on style or content of a post. Posts are only filtered based on the following technical criteria:

• All non-plain text parts and attachments are removed from all posts. If this results in an empty post, that post is rejected.
• In particular: if a post consists only of HTML, with no plain-text part, an attempt will be made to convert it to plain text, but if that fails, it will be rejected.
• Posts over 15KB in size (currently, after removal/conversion of non-plain text, but including all headers) are held for approval.
• Posts with 10* or more addressees in To: or Cc: combined and posts which don't address the forum explicitly in To: or Cc: are held for approval. This is intended to provide a degree of protection against spam and e-mail worms. But also note that some people are offended by having their address revealed in the To: or Cc: of a post to a large list.
  * This number is subject to change as circumstances warrant.