[Courses] Topics on the Courses mailing list

[Terri Oda]

Among the nice new things in Mailman 2.1 is support for topics, and I've
just set this list up to use them.

There are two important things you should know about the topics:

1. You can be subscribed to all or only some of the topics.
2. To make sure your post goes with the right topic, simply put the tag for
   that topic into your Subject: line.  (Yes, this is exactly what we do
   already, just now there's even more reason to do it.)

SUBSCRIBING TO TOPICS
=====================

If you go to your list options page
(http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/options/courses/EMAILADDRESS) you
can see the 5 courses which are running currently:

* C programming course (Uses header [C])
* LaTeX document-markup course (Uses header [LaTeX])
* Python programming course (Uses header [Python])
* Perl programming course (Uses header [Perl])
* Networking course (Uses header [Networking])

If you are only interested in some of these courses, you can choose them
from the list.  

Posts which don't match one of these topic filters are in a separate
category.  In the section marked "Do you want to receive message that do not
match any topic filter?", you can choose whether you want to receive them. 

POSTING TO TOPICS
=================
To send a message related to a given course topic, just do as we have been
doing all along: put the appropriate tag into the Subject: line.  (eg: [C]
for the C course, [Networking] for the networking course).  These tags do
not seem to be case sensitive, so as long as you spell the word right, you
should be fine.

Please note: As far as I can tell, Mailman can't handle things being on more
than one topic at once, so if you have two tags in your subject line, only
one will be used to define the topic of that message.  The rules are checked
in order, so topics higher in the list I just gave will be matched first. 
Basically, just don't put more than one tag in your Subject: line and it'll
make life that much easier.

FOR MORE HELP
=============
Unfortunately, I haven't spotted any documentation for topic filtering other
than the stuff built in to the mailman web interface.  I'm currently
involved in writing the Mailman 2.1 documentation, though, so feel free to
ask me.  If I don't know the answer to your question, I'm probably going to
have to learn it eventually, and this way I'll know that that information
needs to go into the documentation.  

 Terri