As the FreeBSD handbook states in Internet Resources section: "This is the mailing list for people interested only in occasional announcements of significant FreeBSD events. This includes announcements about snapshots and other releases. It contains announcements of new FreeBSD capabilities. It may contain calls for volunteers etc. This is a low volume, strictly moderated mailing list." This, of course, leaves the question of just what constitutes a "significant FreeBSD event" somewhat poorly defined. This message is an attempt to clarify that somewhat. The FreeBSD-announce subscription list currently has some 22,000 entries in it, a large number of which are mailing lists which contain even more users of their own. Suffice it to say that a very conservative estimate would put the total readership of this list well above 50,000 individuals scattered across many different countries. This means that whatever gets posted to it has to have some *global* relevance or a large percentage of these 50,000+ people will not benefit from your posting at all. At various times in the past, certain material such as announcements for local user group meetings has also been posted to this list, resulting in a situation where shivering people up beyond the Arctic circle see messages like "The Gresham Oregon FreeBSD User's Group (GOFUG) will be meeting at the Fosters Freeze tonite at 8:00, everyone please be sure to bring one goat and a CD in order that ..." It's just not widely relevant to FreeBSD or the "average" FreeBSD user as a whole and it's something which will be strongly discouraged from now on. This should not be taken as a rebuke to those -announce users who were never quite clear on this before and may now feel accused of having done something evil and wicked. As I said above, the charter has always left this ill-defined and so freebsd-announce, which never sees a lot of traffic anyway, simply got used for such purposes. A good example of an "appropriate" use of freebsd-announce would be to shout about a truly announce-worthy new feature, service or product which applies to FreeBSD users world-wide. If someone were to port FreeBSD to the IBM 3090, for example, that would certainly be a rather announce-worthy event. If a major ISV like Oracle were to suddenly offer FreeBSD-native versions of their commercial products on the open market, that would be another. The availability of each major release of FreeBSD, for that matter, falls into that category. I think you all get the idea. With apologies to all for any previous misunderstandings on this topic, - Jordan ----- End forwarded message ----- This is the moderated mailing list freebsd-announce. The list contains announcements of new FreeBSD capabilities, important events and project milestones. See also the FreeBSD Web pages at http://www.freebsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-announce" in the body of the message