Tech Support

Widespread problems for Jiscmail users, affecting hundreds of academic mailing lists – patience advised

Jo Brodie email, howto, notTwitter, Tech Support , , , , ,

Jiscmail hosts over 4,000 academic discussion mailing lists on a huge variety of subjects and sub-topics, with 1.24m subscribers, largely from UK research institutions. Anyone can be a subscriber, lists are free to join, the only restriction is that the list-owner needs to be someone with a an .ac.uk email address. Currently around 500 of those mailing lists have been experiencing an ongoing disruption in message delivery. If you search Twitter for jiscmail or jiscmailhelp you’ll see some examples.

Status updates
@Jiscmailhelp | Service Disruption page

 

4,135 Jiscmail lists at time of screenshot. Click to see how many now. If you’re not logged in you’ll probably see a smaller number.

 

1,240,370 unique subscribers and counting! Click to see latest figure.

Above: latest figures for how many lists and subscribers Jiscmail has

How it started…

For many subscribers problems began last week when around 50,000 people (4% of total subscribers) were automatically unsubscribed from around 500 mailing lists (12% of lists, including psci-com which saw its membership drop suddenly from around 4,780 to around 3,500) with an error message suggesting the problem lay with their mail provider and that people should resubscribe and talk to their sysadmins.

The problem actually turned out to be caused by an error in spam management (see Service Disruption page) with one of the Jiscmail servers being added to a spam blacklist (twice!). That caused list messages to be refused and treated as spam and the resulting error messages that this generated was what triggered the mass auto-unsubscribing.

Even once the cause was identified and isolated problems persisted. Those who successfully resubscribed themselves began to receive persistent error messages saying that they couldn’t be subscribed. Anyone submitting an email to a moderated list (psci-com) received persistent copies of an error message saying their email had been forwarded to the moderator. Once their message had been posted to the list they got messages saying it couldn’t be posted, and so on. The error messages bore little relation to what was going on.

How it’s going…

By Friday 13th (heh) afternoon Jiscmail had resubscribed all the lost subscribers and the error messages dwindled. However new messages intended for distribution on the affected lists stopped appearing, either on-list (where a list is unmoderated) or in the moderation queue (for moderated lists).

I sent a test message on Sunday afternoon but it didn’t appear in the moderation queue and more than 24 hours later I received an error message from my mail provider (rather than from Jiscmail) saying it couldn’t be sent to the list.

I also sent an update to an unmoderated Jiscmail list (for list-owners’ discussions) and it’s not come through either.

Currently nothing appears to be getting through on many, but confusingly not all, Jiscmail mailing lists. I’ve updated psci-com’s home page and accompanying Twitter feed but annoyingly I can’t email everyone on the list to tell them of the problem because…

I also wonder if university sysadmins have been swamped with requests for help with a problem that’s not something they’d be able to fix.

Hopefully it will all be resolved soon 🙂 Solidarity to fellow list-owners!

Other than this glitch Jiscmail is FANTASTIC and if you have an interest in an academic subject (you don’t have to BE an academic) you might like to have a look at the available mailing lists and see if there’s one for you. For many of them you can read the posts on the public archive (but you won’t be shown people’s email addresses).

If you’re interested in public engagement with science and science communication for a public audience then psci-com might be of interest.

Some mailing lists which have been affected (from tweets sent about them) include art-all, epnet, mist, nccpe-pen, psci-com (mine) and punic-uk. CCP4BB was affected but messages seem to be getting through OK now.

 

How to find the Jiscmail list for you

• Just a big list of categories to whet your appetite (nothing to click into for more info though). This, in the Advanced Search tools halfway down the Advanced Search page, is potentially more useful however.

• A – Z of lists: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/mailinglists/a-z/index.html
• Scroll through all 4,135 or search them: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?REPORT&z=4

See full list of category headings below.

 

We should have an International Ctrl+F Day, share useful IT tips for regular users

Jo Brodie howto, notTwitter, Tech Support , , , ,

A screenshot of a photograph of a Mac keyboard with Command key and letter F highlighted with a yellow circle

International Ctrl+F Day – 18th August

I would like to propose the first annual International Ctrl+F Day on 18th August 2022, which is the 11th anniversary of the publication of Alexis Madrigal’s “Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F” article in The Atlantic which honestly blew my mind. The idea of people visually searching for a word or phrase on the web or in a Word document or PDF. What? Noooo!

The article arose from speaking with Dan Russell, a ‘search anthropologist’ at Google who’d sat with thousands of Google users, asking them to do tasks so he could learn how people use computers / internet / search engines. Dan found that 90 per cent of them scroll up and down in a document to find a phrase, rather than just ‘wormholing’ there with Ctrl+F, or Command+F on a Mac (you press the Ctrl or Command key first, then the letter F). The internet was quite diverted by this news.

How should we celebrate ICFD?

For those who wish to participate my suggestion would be to share a nice helpful mildly nerdy tip with friends, family or colleagues in a manner of your choosing.

Perhaps share the Ctrl+F article on Facebook, or share some useful snippet on the work intranet (perhaps “how to add your email address to the photocopiers” so that people can scan and email documents to themselves). Do members of your family regularly print articles from the internet? Do they know they can save a LOT of paper if they give themselves a little extra work to begin with by pasting the text into notepad or Word? Perhaps they might like that. Or have a glance at the list of posts on this blog for inspiration. Do tell people how to do Ctrl+F on a phone (for an iPhone it’s pull-down, start typing – I’m assuming something similar for other phone types).

While drafting this post I’ve used the following ‘nifty tricks’ which others might not know about (or you might have a better way of doing things, or know different tricks).

1. Every time I paste a quote in from the web I first paste it into notepad then copy and paste it from notepad into the post. This gets rid of formatting. I also do this when writing emails (paste it first into the subject line, then re-copy it and paste it into the email body). I hate having to reformat text so get that out of the way first. I always have a notepad file on the go for this sort of deformatting.

2. When pasting a quote I put the “” in place first, then paste the text inside the quotes. This means that if I’ve forgotten to de-format the text before pasting it there’s a character at the end already in the correct format. I really hate pressing Enter, starting to type and realising I’ve ‘inherited’ the previous unwanted formatting. Ugh 😉

3. While I didn’t use it in this instance I often use XXXX as a placemarker when I embed Tweets (or YouTube videos) so that I can open the editing window in HTML mode, use Ctrl+F to find XXXX and then replace it with the embed code by pasting it in. As it happens, on WordPress blogs you don’t need to use the embed code and can just paste in the tweet’s URL / link and it fwoomphs into its  tweetly appearance. Of course I use Ctrl+C to copy text (or an URL) I’ve selected with the mouse (trackpad) and then Ctrl+V to paste it.

 

Let’s make the computing world marginally more navigable 🙂

I think it’s a nice thing to share your knowledge, particularly if it might make other people’s lives easier. Other things I’ve shared are about being careful when sharing a web link as it might include info about your address(1) and in general I clean up links of ‘cruft’ before sharing them, to keep things nice and tidy on the internet 🙂 I tidy up referrer links for example.

 

Background to this

I’d been using Ctrl+F for as long as I could remember(2) and I think I picked up the shortcut from spotting that Edit / Find menus had the shortcut listed next to it. Here’s what it looks like on a Mac.

Screenshot of Word's Edit menu on a Mac. Find is highlighted in blue and the next options are Find, Find Next and Find Previous, also the Replace options. The basic Find option has a shortcut listed next to it saying Command symbol F. On a Windows computer it's Control key + F.
Screenshot from a Mac computer highlighting the Edit / Find menu options and showing the suggested keyboard shortcut next to it.

It’s possible someone told me at some point in the 1990s, but I’m pretty sure I just noticed it, and consequently thought (not that I’d previously given it any thought) that everyone else had too, assuming (wrongly) that everyone else ‘saw’ what I saw. The article pointed out that it wasn’t just that people weren’t using keyboard shortcuts to quickly find something, they weren’t even using the Edit / Find menu to access this.

“I do these field studies and I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve sat in somebody’s house as they’ve read through a long document trying to find the result they’re looking for. At the end I’ll say to them, ‘Let me show one little trick here,’ and very often people will say, ‘I can’t believe I’ve been wasting my life!'” – Dan Russell

Alexis’ follow up post on 22 August 2011 “Why using Control+F may be the most important skill” pointed out that there had been 3 reactions to the first post:

“1) Whoa! That’s crazy! 2) No one knows keyboard shortcuts and it’s silly of you to expect that they do. 3) Wow, I did not know about this shortcut and it is awesome. All of which make sense in their own way.” – Alexis Madrigal

I often (often) find myself ‘just doing something’ on a computer, having done it for one or two decades without giving it much thought, then suddenly observing that I’m doing it and wondering if everyone does it). Each of us develops our own way of doing thing, as the article notes, “Browsing is an inherently private phenomenon and so tips and tricks are not so easily shared.”

This entire blog, and the #MildlyUsefulInfo hashtag on Twitter, are my response to that – sharing ways of doing things that I’ve picked up along the way, which others might not have. That’s not meant to sound arrogant, I’ve also picked up stuff from other people doing this – I hadn’t known that you could press and hold the spacebar on a smartphone ‘keyboard’ to control the cursor position, until someone shared that. Much better than ineffectively tapping at the end of a line hoping it would go there and invariably pressing some ‘X’ cancel button in error.

I’ve learned LOADS of things from Twitter pals and the internet more generally, including answers to questions I’ve asked (‘how do I..?’) and the ‘sudden surprises’ like the spacebar thing (which I’d never even have thought to ask about).

 

 

Footnotes

(1) I once entered my full home post code into a website to find out about local things and spotted something I wanted to share on Twitter. I was a bit surprised to spot that my post code had remained in the URL even after clicking on several things. It’s not a great idea to publish the last three alphanumerics of your post code as it narrows things down considerably, often to within several houses on your street. Similarly Deliveroo uses a geohash code which is a string of apparent gibberish but resolves precisely to your latitude and longitude. I had been about to share a link to a local restaurant and was glad to have spotted that first.

(2) I learned to touch type in 1988 so am very comfortable with a keyboard, I’ve been using PCs via command line (terminal) before Windows / Macs became widely available and I’m now familiar with both of those too. And smartphones.

 

 

Charities: you can get a free hour of digital help from volunteer nerds #DigitalCandle

Jo Brodie howto, notTwitter, Tech Support , , , , ,
Digital Candle logo
Digital Candle logo

Charity people: “Get free help with almost any digital challenge by asking a question on Digital Candle“

Digital / techy people: volunteer your time!

I think this is a lovely idea, which I heard about thanks to my friend Joe Freeman with whom I worked for several years in the charity sector, so I signed up as an expert.

Charities, big or small, can ask a question on the online form and the people behind Digital Candle will match them to a techy-minded digital expert who may be able to help. Both sides are put in touch and, if it’s something that the techy person can help with, then they arrange a ~1hr telephone or Zoom chat and discuss options. The aim isn’t for the techy person to go in all guns blazing and swamp the charity person / people with all the answers but to listen and bounce ideas around.

See what other people say about it on Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=digitalcandle.org.uk&f=live

Typically charities might want help with digital marketing / social stuff and this tweet shows a screenshot of some typical skills the techy folk have (text based version below).

Text based version of the screenshot in the tweet above.

  • Volunteer Management Systems
  • Salesforce, CRM, WordPress, Drupal, Server administration, html/css, business analysis [text cuts off]
  • Data strategy, data management, data science, service design
  • digital strategy & transformation, social media marketing, social media advertising, content [text cuts off]
  • UX Design
  • Service design, User research, Online learning design
  • Digital strategy and marketing, web content, UX, SEO

I don’t really know how to do any of that (except HTML and maybe some basic social media marketing – I can send a few tweets / blog posts / Facebook posts out about an event for example) but as you can see from the existence of this blog I can do some technically-minded things that might be useful. At the end of this post is a copy of my application to be an expert (which was successful despite being obviously considerably less techy than the average, or rather my techy skills are in a slightly different domain maybe).

My experience as a digital expert
I had a meeting online with two people from a charity (I won’t name the charity as I haven’t asked their permission) and one of the things we chatted about was coming up with some possible ways to get more photographs of the work they were doing (that they could use in marketing material or in annual reports etc) and then getting those photos uploaded so everyone in the charity could use them, and manage and tag them appropriately so they’re searchable.

One way might be to encourage everyone at the start of the event (at the ‘all hands’ housekeeping meeting at the start) to take photographs, and upload them or make them available to someone else who might do the uploading and tagging. Volunteers might not be aware that they can take photos in a public place (obviously being a bit more careful if children are present) and don’t need complicated model-release forms.

Flickr lets you batch edit photos so they call get the same name and tags at once and you can put the photos in an album to keep them all together (and make the photo or album private so it’s only available to staff).

I think it’s helpful to note that this example includes both a technical discussion (how to tag, where to store, what platform to use) as well as a social one (empowering and encouraging staff to take photos, and to take responsibility for uploading them, also agreeing on categories and tags etc). Almost any digital discussion can benefit from considering it as a sociotechnical thing – people and technology.

My application

“My expertise might be a bit niche – I am not a developer and can’t code but am pretty comfortable with the more technical side of Twitter (I suppose I’m a ‘power user’) and regularly blog on that and other topics https://howtodotechystuff.wordpress.com/index/sitemap/ and also share “Oooh I think people should know how to do *this*” on the hashtag #MildlyUsefulInfo https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MildlyUsefulInfo&f=live

If someone’s trying to find something on the internet, or find a deleted file or something like that I might be able to help. But in terms of ‘how best to reach Audience X with a well-timed Tweet and evaluate its effectiveness’ – not so much 🙂

I used to work at Diabetes UK as a Science Information Officer for 8 years, did a bit of tweeting from our medical conference, but don’t currently work in the charity sector (since 2012) so it’s probably changed a lot (!) since then.

Also, I don’t know if the one hour chat is intended to be self-contained – I may not know the answer to something but I’m very good at finding stuff out and assessing it. But if it’s a ‘how do I do X?’ with the hope of a complete answer within an hour then there are probably better ‘digital folk’ on your register.

This is the first I’ve heard of your service so I will go and have a wander around your site – I wonder if you have a list of frequently asked questions, which could be useful both in providing generic answers as well as scoping out what areas people are more likely to need help with. (I am thinking of the Restart Project which has repair parties to help people fix broken elecrical and electronic equipment – they make a note of all the devices and problems and can feed back to manufacturers that ‘this connector keeps breaking’).

Should this text be destined for an ‘About Jo’s expertise’ page, feel free to prune bits out as suits 🙂

What an excellent scheme!

Jo”