The following FAQs
may be helpful to members who have questions on how we operate, how to compose
and submit comments for The Roundtable Forum, or how to send in photos,
documents, or other attachments.
This page last updated: 20 February 2009
Click the desired
topic:
1.
Roundtable purposes and goals
2. How to compose a submission to The Roundtable Forum
4. I'm afraid my question is too elementary, or that it's already
been discussed.
5. My submission to The Roundtable Forum wasn't published.
6. I’m not receiving the e-mail announcement of a new issue of
the newsletter.
7. Photos, documents, and other attachments
8. Why does it take so long for my comments to appear in The
Roundtable Forum?
9. Contacting the originator of a message
10. Old Roundtable messages and archives
12. I want to send you a message but I don't want it published.
1.
What are the goals or purposes of the BOMRT?
There are two:
(1) promote universal knowledge of the Battle of Midway and understanding of
its importance, and (2) honor the men who fought and won it.
2.
How should I compose a submission for The Roundtable Forum?
There is really only
one firm requirement: restrict your message to just one topic. Each
article or message in the Roundtable Forum is introduced by a headline
that describes its topic. If your message covers that topic plus another
unrelated topic, then it doesn’t fit our format. (See Question #5 for more on multiple subject messages.)
Beyond that, we have almost no rules here, so compose your message any way you
wish. Be aware that any message selected for publication may be
edited. Messages should be limited to a
maximum of about 400 words. Exceptions are made in the case of messages
from Battle of Midway veterans or special compositions of unique interest.
The address to send
your message is: midway.rt@gmail.com
3.
What subject matter is appropriate for The Roundtable Forum?
Our Battle of Midway
veterans on the Roundtable have indicated that they prefer to see material
related to the battle itself, or at least to the first year of WWII in the
Pacific. However, we frequently include
other topics if they are likely to be of interest to the majority of our
members and have some relevance to our goals and core subject matter.
No question is too
elementary for the Roundtable. Our members, including our BOM vets, are
happy to respond to any reasonable question, no matter how basic or complex.
And don't be concerned about repeating previous topics—those are the
easiest questions to answer, so they are quite welcome.
5.
My submission to The Roundtable Forum wasn't published.
Some
possibilities:
~
Your topic was not sufficiently relevant to our usual subject matter (see
Question #3 above).
~ Your
comments appeared to be intended primarily for just one member.
~
Your comments had some sort of undesirable content (i.e., acrimony, salty
language, etc.).
~
Your message was much too long for use in the Forum. (See Question
#2 above.)
~
Your comments mostly repeated information previously published.
~
Your comments were rendered irrelevant or moot by subsequent events or
circumstances.
~
The editor is holding your message for use in a future issue of the Forum
(see also Question #8 below).
~
You wrote about two or more unrelated subjects in one message. (See
Question #2 above.)
~
Your message could not be identified as coming from a member of our roster.
The BOMRT is an association of participating members, not an anonymous
message board. If you haven't already joined us as explained on our
"How to Join the BOMRT" page, click here
and supply the requested info to solve the problem.
6.
I’m not
receiving the e-mail announcement of a new issue of the newsletter.
A new issue of The
Roundtable Forum is normally posted on our web site once per week, usually
on Friday. At the same time, an e-mail
message is sent to all members notifying them of the new issue. The e-mail message also contains additional
information for our members that is not included in the newsletter.
If you stop receiving
the weekly e-mail message, that most likely means that we have encountered a fatal
problem with your primary e-mail address AND you have not provided the editor
with a secondary address in order to contact you when such troubles
occur. Non-deliveries due to ISP and server problems are very
frequent. In any case, if the newsletter announcement mysteriously
stops arriving for no known reason, contact the editor as shown at the bottom
of our About the BOMRT page and he will try to help you.
The most frequent cause
of non-receipt is the anti-spam feature in many ISPs, servers, and personal
computers. The newsletter announcement is sent with multiple hidden
addresses in the message header, which can look like spam to security
software. In some cases, the solution may be as simple as opening the
"bulk mail" or “spam” folder in your e-mail service and finding the
message there—you should have an option for marking the message as “not
spam.” That may permanently solve the problem. Otherwise, you may
have to manually register our e-mail address, midway.rt@gmail.com
as an authorized contact in order to solve it. You may need tech
support at your ISP or IT department to do it.
In
rare cases, it may be impossible to send the e-mail announcement to your
preferred ID if your server or IP address has been blacklisted. That
sometimes happens automatically when an ISP, a server, or a computer’s IP
address is determined to be a chronic source of spam (which can occur even
if you never do anything to originate spam). Should that happen in your
case, the editor will contact you in order to work out a solution if you have
provided an alternate e-mail address or other means for contact.
If you sent us a message to sign up as a new member and never got a reply, the problem may be that you are using an e-mail service that employs “sender verification.” Any message sent to you from a new source is blocked unless the sender initially carries out a manual registration process with your ISP. We don’t do that on the Roundtable. Members need to supply an e-mail address that will receive messages from us without the necessity of special procedures. If the problem is “sender verification” on your end, you might consider registering our e-mail address (above) in advance as an authorized correspondent. Otherwise, you will need to supply another e-mail address that does not require special procedures.
7.
All about photos, documents, and other attachments
We love photos and
historical documents on the Roundtable. If you’d like to bring an image
or document that you found on another web site to our attention, just copy the
URL and send it to us in a message along with your comments (don’t attach and
e-mail the item itself). Also, if you have
pictures or documents that do not appear anywhere on the Internet, feel free to
attach and send them to us by e-mail.
Anything you attach and e-mail should be limited to about 10 mB. If you have something bigger that you’d like
to contribute, send a description in an e-mail message and we’ll work something
out.
8.
Why does it take so long for my message to appear in The Roundtable
Forum?
There
are several possible reasons. Here are a few:
~ Priority is given
to messages received from Battle of Midway veterans.
~ The number of
messages received during some weeks is more than will fit into a single issue
of the Forum. The
excess is held for future use,
possibly several weeks later.
~ Your message covers
a new topic that the editor wants to save for an upcoming issue.
~ Your message
required extensive editing which the editor has yet to finish (see Question #2
above).
9.
How can I reply directly to the originator of a Forum article or
comment?
The weekly notice
sent to all members includes the e-mail address of each member who appears in
the current edition of our newsletter.
You should see the address as a link, which you can simply click in
order to start a new outgoing message to that member.
10. How can I get back issues of The Roundtable Forum
and other archived documents?
Recent issues can be
opened and viewed directly from this web site:
Click Back Issues
on our home page.
Otherwise, nearly all
e-mail messages transmitted under the old Roundtable format during the period
of October 1999 through April 2004 and all back issues of The Roundtable
Forum can be found on the No
Right to Win CD.
Individual back
issues, or Zip files containing all of them can also be sent to any member upon
request. If requesting our archives via Zip files, note that they are
very large (about 30 mB for all) and that you’ll need WinZip or equivalent in
your computer. The files are:
Volume
1: Oct 1999 - Sep 2002 (e-mail archives, W. Price as moderator)
Volume
2: Oct 2002 - Apr 2004 (e-mail archives, R. Russell as moderator, sent in two
files)
Volume
3: May 2004 - present (The Roundtable Forum, all issues)
The Zip files cannot
be sent to a member who does not have a broadband internet connection. If you are on a dialup and don’t have the No
Right to Win CD, you can still get the archive files on a CD for the minor
cost of making and mailing the disk.
Contact the editor for info.
11. Since membership on the Roundtable is free, who pays the
expenses?
Well, we
endeavor to keep this a no-cost operation to the extent possible.
Ordinarily, the only expenses a member ever incurs is postage for occasionally
mailing an item to another member or to reimburse the cost of reproducing or
providing an item of interest.
12. I want to send you a message but I don't want it
published.
Anything you send to
the editor may wind up in the Forum, either in whole or in part, if he
thinks it to be of general interest. To ensure that your message remains
private, enter "NO DIS" (No Distribution) on the subject line or at
the beginning of the text.
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