My friends - As the tenured members of this List are aware, when the subject "Administratavia" appears in the headers in one of my messages, it is usually indicative of a narrative on my part that will address list protocol and guidelines. That is again the case with this message. I have today had to remove an individual from the JP List, as a result of that individual sending negative, inflammatory commentary via private e-mail to another List subscriber. The recipient of this message did exactly as I have requested - the offending message was sent to me for review and for determination of action to be taken. One of the guidelines(which are present in the Welcome Message that everyone receives when they subscribe)states clearly that there will be no "flaming", either on the List directly, or by private e-mail from one List member to another. Anyone engaging in such activity can expect to be removed from the List, and not permitted to return. I have an almost zero tolerance for these sorts of things. We have much too much good to do here without carping at one another. If anyone has a question or concern about what is being posted to the JP List, please contact me by private e-mail, and I will certainly be glad to hear and respond to whatever concerns anyone may have. If you receive a flame from some other List member, send a complete copy of it to me by private e-mail(without responding to the sender of the flame), and I will deal with it. As a review, the other guidelines for the JP List are: -No off-topic chat or discussion -No attachments sent to the List -No virus warnings sent to the List To elaborate just a little about each of these - in the case of off-topic chat or discussion, this means primarily discussion about current political, religious or other subjects which are not relevant to the purpose of the JP List. The JP List is dedicated to the discussion of the history and genealogy of the families of the 8 counties in the KY Jackson Purchase region(which are Ballard, Calloway, Carlisle, Fulton, Graves, Hickman, Marshall and McCracken counties). We do not deal with other KY counties, such as Livingston, Caldwell, Trigg, Lyon, or other "western" KY counties, except in passing mention of those locales when discussing migration of families. These other counties have their own county or regional mail lists. We do occasionally deal with Stewart, Henry, Weakley and Obion counties in TN, since there was an almost continuous migration back and forth between these counties and those in the JP region. Discussions about families in those TN counties, however, should have some foundation in fact or reasonable expectation that the families also resided in the KY JP region. In the case of virus concerns - if you have a serious concern about a virus, send me, by private e-mail, the information you have and I will check it out. About 99% of the virus warnings that we see are hoaxes. Finally, I want to address the matter of "netiquette" on the JP List. Generally speaking, it is wise not to reply to a list posting by resending the entire original message that was posted back to the List with a response. Edit the original message so that only the core points are mentioned, to refresh the memories of those who might not recall those core points from the original message. In addition, there is a somewhat fine line between what can be considered "new" material that all of our 570 subscribers may need to see, and correspondence which is primarily "chat" oriented. Once a contact is made about a subject or family and a response has been received via the List from others who are interested in that topic, it is generally best to continue the discussion via private e-mail between these parties. Should others want to join that now private discussion, they can do so, because they will have read, and have access to, the earlier postings on the List that started the discussion. The larger that the subscribership grows, the more intensive is the need to keep the List postings focused, concise, and on-topic. We rarely have that problem on the JP List - it is one of the most focused and on-topic mail lists of the 17,000 in existence, and all of you are to be thanked for that. My apologies for the long post, but it has been awhile since I mentioned these matters, and I took this opportunity to go through the guidelines again. Now, back to rootin'.......... -B ============================================================