[fitsbits] New owner/moderator for <fitsbits>

[Don Wells]

Dear friends of FITS,

I retired from NRAO four months ago, after 40 years on astronomy
payrolls.  I still have a small office space at NRAO, and I still have
my <dwells at nrao.edu> account, but I am definitely in the process of
reducing my professional activity level, slowly but steadily.

I have operated the <fitsbits at nrao.edu> mailing list (exploder) for
the past 17 years.  The time has come for me to begin transferring
that responsibility to someone else.  I have asked Bill Pence to join
me as co-owner/co-moderator of <fitsbits>, and he has accepted.  The
suffix line on traffic and on the web pages associated with <fitsbits>
now reads 'fitsbits list run by William.D.Pence at nasa.gov, dwells at
nrao.edu'.

I am grateful to Bill for his willingness to take on this duty.

Regards,
Don Wells

PS: The Mailman software which operates <fitsbits> was upgraded on
    Sunday 10-19 (8 days ago).  The new version 2.1.5 has new features
    to assist with management of mailing lists.  I am especially
    pleased by a new button which enables bulk deletion of spam
    traffic held for moderation.  However, the moderation policies
    associated with exploder<-->newsgroup gateways were changed in an
    unfortunate way which allowed several pieces of spam traffic to
    'leak' from sci.astro.fits to <fitsbits> unmoderated.  The first
    such traffic was titled '[fitsbits] RTGUI now has Scripting for
    Telescope Automation, & Double Star catalogs' and dated 'Mon, 20
    Sep 2004 18:54:05 GMT' (one week ago).  The goal of my test
    messages on Friday 10-24 was to develop a new combination of
    configuration settings which would return <fitsbits> to the mode
    of operation which it had with the previous version of Mailman.
    Please report any problems with <fitsbits> to Bill and/or me.

-- 
  Donald C. Wells        Scientist (retired)          dwells at nrao.edu
                    http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~dwells
  Charlottesville, Virginia USA                       +1-434-962-3363