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: 3 July 2008
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the desired topic:
1. Roundtable purposes and goals
2. How to compose a submission to The Roundtable Forum
3. Appropriate subject matter
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 didn't receive an issue of The Roundtable Forum.
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
11. Who pays the expenses?
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 for your message format:
restrict it to just one topic.
Each article in the Roundtable Forum is introduced by a boldface
headline that describes the subject of the article. If your message
covers that subject plus one or more others that are unrelated, then it cannot
be used. (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, depending on its length and
content. 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.
Note that your e-mail address will appear with your published message so
that other members can contact you directly with questions or comments. If you want your e-mail address withheld, be
sure to tell the editor in the body of your message. (E-mail addresses are not included in the web edition.)
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 commentary primarily related to the battle itself, or at least to
the first year of WWII in the Pacific, more or less from Pearl Harbor to the
Battle of Santa Cruz. However, we frequently include other topics if
they are likely to be of significant interest to the majority of our members
and have at least some relevance to our stated 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—we are constantly getting new members, so your question will be
new to them and worth reviewing for nearly everyone else.
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. In some cases the editor will
extract one of your subjects and print that portion of your message in the Forum. (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.
§
Finally, the editor
may not have received your message.
6. I didn't receive an issue of The
Roundtable Forum.
The Roundtable Forum is normally sent to
all members once per week, usually on Friday.
Check the issue number on each to determine if you're missing
anything. You can also check for the current issue on our web site. The editor will send you any
missing issues upon request.
If you stop receiving the Forum altogether, 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 Forum 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.
Our newsletter is sent with multiple hidden addresses in the 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
Roundtable e-mail 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. 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 than 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. However,
because of the lengthy download time for members using dialup modems, we never
publish photos or other attachments in The Roundtable Forum.
Instead, photos (etc.) are detached, processed, and posted on our web site,
with an appropriate link in the Forum, so that each member can view them
at his or her convenience. Note: There is an important exception
to the this process. If you have found a photo or other document on the Internet
that you'd like to include with your commentary for the Forum, please do
not download and send the item to the editor with your comments.
Instead, simply copy and paste the URL into your message, along with any
accompanying description or explanation that you'd like to add. We'll
then use your supplied link in the Forum. This method saves a lot
of unnecessary processing time and will result in your comments appearing in
the Forum much sooner.
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 originator's e-mail address usually follows his or her name at the
beginning of each published Forum article. Depending on your
e-mail program, you may see the address as a link, which you can simply click
in order to compose a new outgoing message to the article's author. In
any case, the wrong thing to do is click the REPLY button at the top of
your screen. That will send your response back to the editor, not to the
article's originator. Regrettably, the editor cannot take the time to
manually relay your message to the intended addressee, so be sure that your
outgoing "reply" message is going to the person whom you really want
to receive it.
10. How can I get back issues of The
Roundtable Forum and other archived documents?
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 sent to any member upon
request. The archives are contained in four large Zip files, for which
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)
Please note that the file sizes are very large, about
25 mB for all four, so allow time if you don’t have a high-speed Internet
connection. Download time on a dialup would be from one to two hours or
more. If you only want back issues of The Roundtable Forum, request just
Volume 3 of the archives. Download time on a modem should be only 10 to 15
minutes. Alternately, the files can be
sent to you on a CD via snail mail for a nominal cost. 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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