Arnoldo and Eva are out of the office
Due to a wrong calibration of the ISBA email announcing the publication of the latest ISBA Bulletin, the whole ISBA membership is now getting the automated email responses of those ISBA members (like Arnoldo and Eva!) who are away from their mail (“I am out of the office until…“). Worse, each one of those automated responses is inducing a further cascade of automated responses from the other ISBA members who are away from their mail..! Will it ever stop? cause the Internet to stop by noon today? bring the World to an early end?! (I am actually surprised that the computer systems do not recognise those “away from” messages and do not prevent them from bouncing happily back and forth between Indianapolis and Oslo and… I am also glad very few members chose to activate this option on their mailing system! Otherwise we would have already reached hundreds of emails instead of “just” a few dozens.)
July 20, 2011 at 8:19 am
Merlise sent the following message in the wake of the email disaster:
If you are subscribed to the ISBA News forum, please accept our deepest apologies for the flood of emails yesterday !!! I would like to thank all of you who helped stopped the flood! (…)
We have turned off email distribution from the public forums while we work with the developer of the forum email program to rectify one of the problems uncovered after the recent mailing. We expect email distribution will be back to functioning as planned – so please stay tuned! If you have any announcements of interest to the Bayesian community, you may still email news@bayesian.org and they will be posted in the forum after approval.
with the side information that 3000 emails were on that list when the dozen “I am away” emails started answering one another…
July 19, 2011 at 3:30 pm
Glad to help :) But the final stop was eventually brought by Lance Brown at 7am local time: he’s the IT admin at Duke in charge of the list’s server, as this latter then started processing its backlog — and to that, there was nothing I could do.
July 18, 2011 at 6:21 pm
We (ISBA members) should all be grateful to Julien Cornebise as he contacted Norway by phone to stop the tennis game of the “out of the office” emails! And managed to do it!!! Merci Julien!