These lists are very active, friendly and open. Traffic is usually in the range of 20 - 50 messages a day on arachne, with a little less on lace chat. Posting to the lists is restricted to members.
Why 2 lists? The original list had over 600 participants in February 1997. The quantity of postings had increased with membership, but the volume of off-topic postings began to be a problem. Now members have the choice of only reading lace-specific postings (lace list), or also sideline chatty postings off-topic (lace-chat), merely by subscribing to one or both lists.
Subscribe to either the reflected or the digested version of either list. The reflector emails each message immediately; the digestor bundles the individual messages to form a single large message which is sent after a sufficient volume has accumulated. The digest contains the exact same information as the reflector, but all in one lump of about 25K.
To subscribe to the any version of the lists, send a message to:
majordomo@arachne.com
The body of the message must contain one line for each list to be subscribed.
These are listed below:
subscribe lace your@address.here
subscribe lace-chat your@address.here
subscribe lace-digest your@address.here
subscribe lace-chat-digest your@address.here
Then on a new line the single word:
end
This prevents the list maintenance program trying to interpret signatures as instructions.
The subscription has worked when a message is received asking for a reply to confirm the subscription. Please read this message carefully and follow the instructions exactly, particularly where to send the message, as it is a different address to that for postings to the list. Once the confirmation is sent back you will receive a confirmation that the command succeeded as well as a welcome message.
There is also a German language lace list, details on my German page.