usual-suspects

[ewx]

If you don't know what usual-suspects@greenend.org.uk is about, you can fairly safely ignore this entry. If you do know what I'm talking about, though, it'd be groovy if you could read http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2001/05/us.html some time.

Comments

[taimatsu]

I have never quite understood usual-suspcts. I mean, I am on it (am i allowed to out myself as a member?) but I have never been officially told a submission address, nor have I much idea who else is on the list, which means I will never use it for publicising my own events, because I don't know who I'd be inviting (and there are one or two usual suspects I'd rather not have turn up). Are there historical reasons for all the secrecy, and why, given that it's a list for event invitations, and people could reasonably want to know who they were inviting, keep the membership a secret even from the members?

Not stirring, just curious.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The original purpose was just a list of email addresses of people we wanted to invite to things at Green End (back when I lived there). It kind of grew in scope a bit over time though; for instance its primary purpose now includes invites to parties at Relativity and Foundation as well. If other people happen to find it useful for invitations then that's great, and some people do seem to. But they don't have to if they don't want to.

I suppose one gets an idea of who is on it by going along to the parties advertized on it.

As to the secrecy: it's now quite a large list of email addresses, and the list was collected with inviting people to parties in mind, rather than e.g. advertizing concerts or whatever. Someone actually tried to do the latter once and that's left some of us a little paranoid about it.

I think of it as more like a newsgroup than a mailing list: if it's a party I'd mention on a newsgroup (which could have pretty much anyone reading it), then it'd be sensible to advertize it to usual-suspects, if not then I'll put together an invitation list manually.

Woo! Go go gadget BOFH!

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

That has to be the shirtiest FAQ I've ever met :)

So do people-you-know-are-real-human-beings get a list of who's on U.S. if they ask, or is it all kept under US-military levels of secrecy?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

It only seems to get updated when I'm annoyed about someone having screwed up, and if you think it's shirty you should see the comment next to the relevant text in the aliases file l-)

I don't hand out the addresses involved to all and sundry because I don't think I'm authorized to; the addresses were collected to invite people to parties, not for whatever other purposes people might want to use them for.

In practice a few people do happen to have access to the address list.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I've updated things in the light of discussion here and elsewhere; I finally got round to creating a submission system that doesn't rely on BCC at all. The FAQ is a bit less anti- the idea of letting out the names on the list, too.

[angoel.livejournal.com]

You've got this FAQ written just in time. Someone's been abusing the list by sending test messages to it ;)