The Other Group

About OtherGroup

The OtherGroup began in 1999 with a small group of Chicago artists, curators, gallery-owners, and writers meeting once a month to discuss, share, gripe, and debate. This forum was transfered to an ongoing, unmoderated e-mail discussion group in 2000. Anyone can join, and we invite to do so. Your e-mail address will remain anonymous. More information below.

- Keri Butler

What we are

OtherGroup consists (currently) of [ 0 ] members. We operate as a listserv -- all discussion is via e-mail forwarded to all members, and is archived at this website, usually within a few seconds.

E-mail sent to group at othergroup.net is automatically sent to all OtherGroup members. Your e-mail address will be visible to members, but will not show on these web pages.

At times there are month long silences. At other times everyone chimes in. Topics have included curatorial philosophy, city politics, music, and exhibitions. At times all sides of an issue are fiercly argued, at other times topics just drift without any apparent direction, or just evaporate.

Just a few pointers:

• There is no particular set of topics agreed upon for discussion -- you may bring up anything;
• Clean up and format your e-mail (see below), and sign a name.

For other matters -- e-mail format, subscription, questions, and corrections, -- see the information below.

Join OtherGroup

If you would like to join The OtherGroup, please send an e-mail to list at othergroup.net with subscribe on the Subject line. Send this from the e-mail address where you want to receive the postings. The body of the e-mail can be blank. We ask no question, we collect no data, we do not sell or give away our list, and the list is not available to members.

You will receive an automated response which lists the e-mail address you used to subscribe with, a brief synopsis of this web page. If you get no results or are confused, request help from help at othergroup.net.

Usage Guidelines

In using e-mail, please observe the following in posting. These guidelines are instituted for security reasons, as anti-spamming measures, and to allow for speed. E-mail not conforming to these basic requirements will be refused.

• Non-text attachments to e-mails are deleted;
• E-mail exceeding 16K will not be accepted.
• E-mail addressed via "Cc:" is not accepted. Cc: headers are deleted.

Cleanup and Filtering

Your e-mail is cleaned up before it is redistributed: Any text from a tag-line (any repetition of dash, underscore, or equal signs), and all text after a "forward" line, is deleted. Lines starting with right hooks (e-mail quoted text) are deleted. If you need to quote what someone else wrote, use quotation marks -- and see the notes below.

Although plain text is preferred, you may use HTML format, base-64 encoded, quoted/printable, multipart/alternative, or multipart/mixed e-mail. All these will be converted to plain text. Eight-bit (Upper ASCII) characters and Control characters are passed as 7-bit conversions, and may not show correctly.

Any distictive "quoting" based on a change in font or font color will be lost, since all text is reduced to text-only (plain text) using the US-ASII character set.

Internet Style

It will help readability if you adopt an internet style for e-mail, rather than the widely used magazine style.

• Forget about 'topic continuity' as the basis for paragraphs, and start new paragraphs every 6 to 8 lines. Even paragraphs of 10 or 12 lines are difficult to scan.

• Quote other people in the shortest manner possible. In many email readers it is virtually impossible to distinguish between your text and blocks of quoted text.

• E-mail is easily misread for 'tone' because people read in a great hurry. Be liberal with smileys, LOL, HTH, and IMHO abbreviations, and with 'joke' or 'funny' comments.

• And conversely, disapprove with subtleness and irony.

• HTML does not space words like a typesetter, so a connected dash will fold sentences in odd places. Use "word -- word", not "word--word".

• Use the form http://domain.com/file for URLs, with blank space before and after. The protocol http:// is required.

• Break long words with a dash -- regardless of what the rules of hyphenation may say.

E-mail headers

• E-mails will be refused unless you use the same e-mail address which you used to subscribe.

• The e-mails you receive will carry the From: address of the sender, in case others need to follow up privately.

• The e-mails you receive will also include the Reply-To: address of "group" at "othergroup.net" -- most e-mail programs will automatically try to send your reply to the "Reply-To:" address.

• Original Reply-To: and Cc: headers of your e-mail are overwritten, but all other headers are passed as they were.

• An X-Size: header is added, indicating the size of the original email before cleanup and html/text conversion.

• An X-Loop: header is added which reads "X-Loop: og post" and is added to prevent looping in e-mail systems. You could use this to for automatic e-mail filing.

• An X-Extracted: header is added, indicating the conversion of an encoded email to plain text.

Web site format

In archiving for this website the e-mail post is reformatted as HTML text from plain text. If you observe the following in your e-mail, your text will be readable when it appears on these web pages.

• To indicate a new paragraph: all you need to do is skip a line. Browsers ignore all empty space, including tabs and the start of new lines. If you do not skip lines your archived e-mails will congeal to a single block of text.

• To indent a block of text: start a new paragraph (skip a line) and start the paragraph with a quote mark. This will indent all the following text until the next blank line. Use a ASCII 034 character, not the MAC open-quote. You can use tabs to format e-mail, but the web page will only tab in response to a quote mark at the start of a paragraph.

• To list items on separate lines: start each line with a hyphen mark. This adds a line break, left adjusted. You can thus have a "lists of things" reproduced as intended. Use a ASCII 045 character, not the MAC m-dash.

• To convert a URL to a link: make sure it starts with http:// and does not contain spaces (but ends in a space). The actual URL text will be bracketed in the text as a clickable link.

The guidelines above apply to the conversion of archived e-mail text for this website. You can do whatever formatting you wish with your e-mail message. Just don't blame us if it gets mangled when your message shows up on this website.

The website archive generates the actual date and time an e-mail arrives, rather than depending on diverse time zones, or machines perpetually set at January 1, 1910.

All e-mail addresses will be removed to prevent harvesting. Please use a name as part of your e-mail, since this is extracted as the second line of a post. The alternate (if there is no name) will be to extract your account name.

Some formatting notes:

• A paragraph is any text up to a blank line. You make a paragraph break by hitting your "enter" or "return" key twice.

• Use the US-ASCII character set for your e-mail. This is the default US character set for e-mail. This will also keep a lot of unreadable characters from showing up on other people's e-mail readers -- and on these web pages.

• Html entities will pass untranslated into the e-mail, but will show correctly on the web pages. That is the minimal help we can offer in the use of accented foreign letters.

• Eight-bit Upper ASCII characters and Control characters are passed as 7-bit conversions. Beware that Macs generate some 30 non-standard 8-bit characters.

• E-mail addresses used in the text will be munged to prevent harvesting by spammers.

List deletion

We will not delete your e-mail address from the list just because your mailbox has temporarily overflowed, or your domain cannot be reached at some time. We will remove your e-mail address only if we collect a large number of consecutive bounces.

Unsubscribing

If you want to unsubscribe from the OtherGroup, or if you change your e-mail address, send an e-mail to list at othergroup.net with the word unsubscribe on the Subject line. Send this from the e-mail address which you wish to unsubscribe. The body of the e-mail can be blank.

You will get a verification. If you get no results or are confused, request help from help at othergroup.net.

You can only subscribe (or unsubscribe) yourself.

Deletions and Corrections

We can delete archived website posts at an author's request, or make corrections. Contact us by sending e-mail to help at othergroup.net with directions on what you want done.

Please identify the month and year, and the number of the post within the archive for that month. All recent posts are numbered.

Questions

If you still have questions after reading all this, contact us at help at othergroup.net -- comments are welcomed also.