NavList:

I first found the community that has evolved into NavList fourteen years ago. I joined and began posting in December 2003, a little over twelve years ago. Today, July 1, 2016, marks the tenth anniversary of my management of NavList following the final, terminal crash of the old "Navigation-L" mailing list at the end of June in 2006. I created the original NavList (at first, as a Google Groups service) a couple of months earlier during an earlier crash of the old mailing list. I could not convince people at that time to switch permanently to a better service (navigators are a naturally conservative group), so I sat back and waited for the system to fail on its own. I figured six months might pass, maybe more, but it happened within weeks, and I will pat myself on the back here for being prepared with a backup. Since the beginning of July 2006 I have been managing the technical side of NavList and occasionally enhancing the front-end and back-end software and other tools to make it more useful for members as well as in its role as a general Internet resource (a reminder: NavList is no longer a "list" --so stop calling it that! It's a service or a community, and like Craigslist it originated as a mailing list, but that's no longer the case). 

I have made some small changes today to the NavList messaging system:

• A couple of you discovered the hard way that messages sent by email from yahoo servers were losing attachments when they got to the NavList server. That's now fixed.
• Attachments uploaded through the message boards sometimes did not appear. This was caused by unusual characters in file names, and that has been fixed as well.
• Long subject lines occasionally dropped a space in replies. There are a couple of instances of this in the current Patrick O'Brian discussion. It's only a minor nuisance, and I had fixed this once before so it was puzzling. Today I discovered that I had fixed it in "dead" code. Aha! Now it's fixed in the right place.
• The message editor has been simplified with some rarely used functions removed. There may be other changes here later this month.

I must reiterate that NavList is valuable entirely because of its content created by all of you, the members of the community. As technical manager, I do not own NavList. This community owns NavList.

Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA

If you haven't in the past year, please consider making a donation for NavList Operations: http://www.fer3.com/contribute.aspx?gid=NavList.