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DC Government Announcements

Rules for Announcements from District of Columbia Officials

Posted on the Cleveland Park Listserv

The Cleveland Park Listserv is the largest neighborhood email list in the United States. Our listserv is very busy place in cyberspace, and requires a lot of work to maintain. To help our list run smoothly, and to help ensure that your messages appear on our list (not all messages are posted), we have developed this set of guidelines for city officials.

1. Messages should be in plain-text only. Messages created in Word or any wordprocessing email program should be retyped as as text messages. Plain text messages may be sent to the group from your subscribed email account or may be posted directly on the group's site on YahooGroups. When messages are created in Word and sent via email, they are processed through Yahoo in a way that introduces formatting problems that prevent them from being posted on our listserv, without substantial reformatting.

3. No part of the subject line should be in all upper-case lettering. The same goes for the body of the message: Upper case is okay for occasional emphasis, but otherwise should be avoided, as this may cause your message to be flagged as spam.

4. No press releases. Messages should not be written in press release format for the Cleveland Park listserv. List members who send in press releases on a regular basis will not be permitted to post on our listserv. No self-congratulatory messages. If the message isn't something that list members need to know or need to act on, please don't post it.

5. No regular, automated announcements. In other words, don't add the Cleveland Park listserv to a distribution list. We want to keep our list's message volume low for the sake of our members' inboxes.

6. Messages should not contain legal disclaimers. Some email systems automatically add disclaimers; please turn this function off, if you can.

7. Sign your message with your own name. Unsigned messages can't be posted on our list.

8. Don't add any additional email addresses to the TO or CC lines of your message. This can confuse the reply sequence for our email list. If you want somebody else to see your message, add their email address to the BCC line only.

9. Messages that are posted on other email lists may be deleted. The Cleveland Park Listserv rarely accepts crossposted messages.

As you can see, most of these guidelines have to do with formatting, because a properly formatted message goes a long way toward making the moderators' jobs easier. We want to post important announcements on our listserv, and this helps us help you.

Which does bring us to point 10:

10. Keep it relevant. For instance, street closure announcements about our neighborhoods are okay; street closure announcements about Constitution Avenue, for example, are far afield of what our listserv is about. The Cleveland Park Listserv covers all or most of the following neighborhoods: Cleveland Park (of course!), Woodley Park, Tenleytown, North Cleveland Park, Forest Hills, Mass. Ave. Heights, and Glover Park. You can view the Listserv map here. When in doubt about the relevance of an announcements, check our lists' rules and guidelines, or just drop the list moderators a note at:

cleveland-park-owner [at] yahoogroups (dot) com

For more information:

Cleveland Park Listserv: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cleveland-park

We realize that these guidelines add a layer of complication to your lives, and that it's simpler to send out announcements as-is. But there are real volunteer moderators working long hours trying to make sure that messages are readable and relevant -- managing multi-thousand member email lists is as complicated as it is time-consuming.

And we really do appreciate the time and work you spend keeping our list members informed.

Bill Adler

Peggy Robin

Owners, Cleveland Park Listserv

Feeling good karma? You can make a donation to this free, community organization, the Cleveland Park Listserv:

The short URL for this page is http://dcgov.notlong.com.