Hi folks,

I'm writing this one on the fly, and ready to move on to other things.  So I'm
going to be brief, and additional questions will have to be dealt with as time
goes by.  This e-mail is, of course, prompted by our move of to new server for
Gambia-L, namely the Listserv server at St. Johns University in New York, NY,
USA. So let me try to address a few issues.

1.  We are moving to the St. Johns server not because of my whim, but because
of the fact that a decision has been reached on an issue that was being
discussed in private by Gambia-L managers anyway.  I tried to find my copies of
correspondence between us to the effect that Anthony Loum, under whose auspices
Gambia-L was hosted at the University of Washington, Seattle, (UW) was not
comfortable with the continued hosting of Gambia-L by his UW.  Other list
managers will recall that at that time, I suggested St. Johns which also hosts
the African Association of Madison list (which I help manage), but the
procedure I suggested was turned down because it was too cumbersome.

It happened that we've had the problem and threat of Matarr Njie in the past
few weeks, as well as a threat by Sedat Kanyi to have UW shut down Gambia-L,
and so in a way these factors made it imperative that we move the list.  Not
because I personally took any of their threats seriously, but because it will
never be justifiable to put anybody's livelihood at risk just to host Gambia-L.
 Mr. Loum had mentioned to us in private, well before the above problems
happened, that UW was re-assessing the use of their e-mail facilities, and so
would like that we move the list.  There is at least one person on this list
that I wrote in private to ask if he could help find a host for Gambia-L.

So it was against this background that I got an e-mail message from Tony last
Monday night (May 17) about re-starting efforts to find Gambia-L a new host.  I
sent an e-mail that night to the administrator at St. Johns, re-expressing
interest in hosting Gambia-L there.  I got an e-mail from him yesterday,
Tuesday (May 18), indicating that he had set Gambia-L up for me.  I was going
to move everyone over to the St. Johns server last night (Tuesday), but ran
into some problems which have been resolved, and so here we are now on the St.
Johns server.

I would like to, at this point, express my sincere gratitude to Anthony Loum
for being such a gracious and understanding sponsor of Gambia-L's stay on the
UW servers.  It was on Jan. 31, 1996 that Gambia-L went live on the UW server,
and since then, there have been a total of 17,478 postings (as of tonight May,
19, 1999 at 9:39 PM Central Time, US).  I agree some of those might have been
junk, "please unsubscribe me!" stuff, but I'm sure you'll agree that there have
been a few gems in there.  And for that we have Tony to be eternally grateful
to.  Please join me in expressing our sincere appreciation to Tony for his
efforts, despite at times very difficult circumstances, to do the best for The
Gambia, and indeed humanity at large.

2.  What's changed?  Not much.  True, we are changing from ListProc to
Listserve in moving from UW to St. Johns Univ.  However, on the whole, it's all
for the better simply because Listserve is much more powerful than ListProc.
Indeed the name "Listserve" has become synonymous with mailing list servers,
just as "Xerox" has become common name for photocopying documents!

From a practical perspective, I'd like to point out the following:

a) all subscribers have been moved to St. Johns.  Some have requested a change
of address, but I haven't gotten to those yet.  Maybe in the next few days.

b) the new address is:

        [log in to unmask]

c)  the managers are still the same:

[log in to unmask] Momodou Camara
[log in to unmask] Momodou Camara
[log in to unmask] Latjor Ndow
[log in to unmask] Sarian Loum
[log in to unmask] Dr. Amadou Janneh
[log in to unmask] Tony Loum

and myself:  [log in to unmask]

d) if you were subscribed to the digest version of the list, you should send
the command:
        set gambia-l digest
to:
        [log in to unmask]

e) to unsubscribe, you should send the command:
        unsubscribe gambia-l
to:
        [log in to unmask]

f)Listserve also allows us to set up different threads or topics of discussion.
  For example, we can have threads on education, health, or tourism, and one
can subscribe to one or more of these threads to receive only postings dealing
with these issues.  This however, requires more than basic configuration, and I
simply don't have the time to get to it now.  Let's walk first, ...

g) Gambia-L will be a lot easier to manage now.  Error-messages will be handled
automatically, and I've configured the server to autodelete problem addresses.
This should only affect those with troublesome mail servers, and should not be
a problem for regular folk.  Let me know if you have serious problems getting
mail from Gambia-L.

h) I have re-configured Gambia-L at UW to reject postings from all except list
owners, myself and Tony.  This is because I'll be writing to the UW contact
person for Gambia-L to have them delete the list as soon as possible.  I will
ask that they save archives of postings to the list, and I'll pick them up
later on the Net.

i) Gambia-L postings are being archived on the St. Johns server on a monthly
basis.  This is because of the fact that the plan is to move the list, again
(!), as soon as I can get a home for it on the Fana Fana Web site.  Speaking of
which, the Gambia-L gateway at http://fanafana.com/gambia-l functions will not
work shortly simply because the Gambia-L it points to will no longer exist at
UW.  I'll be fixing that shortly, so don't use it.

3)  Rules:  I suppose we've had our lessons!  I will be drafting a few
guidelines for Gambia-L at St. Johns and will post them on the list.  Be
assured that we are not going to tolerate any insults, foul language, and
bad-mouthing on the list again.  And this will not be a matter for debate
either, you either take it or leave it.


4) I will be contacting the list managers about how to go about managing the
list.  I hope to do this shortly.

5) Owners of the following addresses need to send in their full names:

[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]

6)  I guess that's about all for now.  I will continue work on fine-tuning
Gambia-L at St. Johns in the next few days, or weeks, but anything that affects
the way you interact with the list will be known to you.

Have a great weekend, and best wishes.

Katim