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hartford - An email discussion forum for Hartford, VT

Subject: An email discussion forum for Hartford, VT

Statement of Purpose

This email list is a discussion forum for topics specific to Hartford. It is not an 'official' list set up by the town government. It is open to anyone who wants to participate. Residents, property owners, and employees may subscribe and post; those without direct connection to the town may subscribe, but are asked not to post without prior clearance from the listserv admins.

Posting Guidelines

Summary – Keep it Local, Keep it Civil, Limit Commercial Postings to Once a Month.

No anonymous posts – If your first and last name are not obvious from your email address, please sign your post.

The intent is to keep the discussion on and about the Town of Hartford, which includes the unincorporated villages of Hartford, Wilder, White River Junction, Quechee and West Hartford. The issue doesn't need to be unique to the town, its school district, its citizens, businesses, vacation home owners or visitors, but it must be specific to the town. Subscribers to the list are assumed to be in agreement about that simple constraint. If in doubt about whether a topic is appropriate for our list, consider this: If there are other online forums, such as email lists, news groups or blogs that address your issue, please take your discussion to one of them.

Some examples:

General Rules

Because this list is set up for the convenience of the community, occasional announcements from businesses in town are ok (for example, a new business in town, information about a business service offered in conjunction with a public event taking place in town, or a one-time listing about babysitting). In no case should any business (small or large, for-profit or non-profit) use the discussion list for frequent repetitive business promotion. Posting commercial announcements more often than monthly may annoy your neighbors and bring a warning from the list administrator. Note this does not apply to any government entity or instrumentality.

This discussion list operates on the assumption that list postings will be civil and respectful to other list members. Debate should be conducted on the issues without reference to individuals, which tends to devolve into personalizing matters and clouding the list with a miasma of bad feelings. Cheering and Booing (posts like "Well said!" or "Utter Nonsense!") are unacceptable forms of contributing to the list; send them directly to the poster. Each post should add something substantially new to the discussion.

No abusive or threatening postings will be allowed. Anyone engaging in what the administration of Vital Communities considers to be abusive language or threats directed towards another list member may have posting privileges revoked.

In order to keep this discussion list useful and dynamic, there should be no verbatim forwarding of content that has already appeared elsewhere. If an article has appeared on the web that would be appropriate to reference in the context of a discussion on this list, please just include the address for the web page on which the article appears. the web page on which the article appears. (This may also be appropriate for lengthy blog-like posts that appear elsewhere – just summarize your point and link to the source.) It is inappropriate to post the content of any private correspondence to or from a list member without the express permission of all correspondents involved.

Similarly, posts should be kept to around 200 words, and certainly under 350 words. Posts in excess of 350 words will be deleted from the archive without warning and not appear in the digest, and the poster will be suspended from list participation until the list managers are persuaded the lesson has been absorbed. Attempts to work around this by posting twitter-style 1/N posts will be treated as a single post. The reason for this rule is that over 95% of subscribers get the list in digest form and lengthy posts are disruptive to their reading experience and can cause multiple digests to be issued, which further confounds subscribers.

Please note that it is the intent of this discussion list to center on issues and events directly affecting this particular town. It is not a venue for general announcements about Upper Valley events from those not connected with the town. Occasional posts from contiguous towns are ok, but, in general, if you have an event or item of interest that might be relevant to multiple towns then please post it on one of the regional Upper Valley lists. Subscribers who regularly post to multiple lists will be warned and eventually suspended. Crossposters should learn how to use the mail merge function of their email client to disguise their exploitation of this ability.

The administration of Vital Communities reserves the right to warn, suspend, or permanently exclude any list subscriber for any abuse or infringement of these list rules and guidelines. To contact Vital Communities with comments or to bring specific issues to their attention, write to discussionlists@vitalcommunities.org.

List Administration

Legal Disclaimer

Vital Communities does not control and assumes no legal or editorial responsibility for any content distributed through the community discussion lists. Content is generated by individual subscribers, who each bear responsibility for their individual postings. Content posted to the discussion lists is automatically distributed to the subscribers and Vital Communities cannot retract or modify any such content before it is sent to subscribers. All historical content is publicly accessible in the archives (Vital Communities can remove content from the archives after the fact upon request from the original poster). Volunteer individual discussion list administrators in each town are responsible for post-facto monitoring of the content of a town discussion list and may, at their own discretion, issue private warnings to individual subscribers or public guidelines to the entire discussion list if, in their sole judgment, any of the Posting Guidelines or General Rules are repeatedly violated.

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