What is CCP4bb?
CCP4bb is an electronic mailing list intended to host discussions about topics of general interest to macromolecular crystallographers. Any crystallographic-related item is acceptable, and doesn’t have to be directly related to CCP4. The bulletin board is routinely used to request information, and to inform people about job vacancies, new services and the availability of new or updated software.
Receiving messages from and posting to CCP4bb
The CCP4bb email list is administered by JISCmail. The list is PUBLIC, meaning that the archives can be accessed by anyone, and are indexed by search engines. For more details, see the JISCmail Service Policies page.
Once you are subscribed to the list, you will automatically receive a copy of each message posted to the list. You can also post a message to CCP4bb by sending it as an email directly to ccp4bb@jiscmail.ac.uk.
To prevent abuse of the mailing list (and particularly to prevent spam being posted to the list), only members of the CCP4bb list are able to post to it. This is done by checking the email address of the sender against the subscribed email addresses. It is therefore very important to subscribe the correct email address.
People are encouraged to post summaries of advice and information received from discussions which they have initiated or participated in (this is especially useful since many of the responses don’t go to the list, only to the person who originally asked the question).
Etiquette
Some useful tips on the etiquette of posting questions to groups such as ccp4bb can be found in this FAQ from Eric Raymond. The advice amounts to: be considerate and think before posting. Some specific rules:
- We strongly discourage the use of attachments to messages, as they can be annoying to those on slow networks links. If you wish to show e.g. a picture of your unknown density, please post on a web site, and include a link in the BB posting.
- We do not condone illegal file sharing, and breaking of copyright. To avoid any misunderstandings, please do not use CCP4BB to ask for PDFs of articles.
- While it is reasonable to ask for personal experiences with programs or instruments, please avoid polls of what is the best program/instrument/manufacturer. The results will be statistically highly dubious, and will antagonise the hard-working people providing the program/instrument.
- Many experts give their time for free to answer questions on CCP4BB. Out of courtesy to them, it is strongly recommended that subscribers use their real names when posting questions.
Subscribing and unsubscribing
There are three ways you can subscribe your email address to CCP4bb
- via the list’s home page at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/ccp4bb.html
- via jiscmail’s subscriber’s corner accessible from the homepage http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk
- posting to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk “SUBSCRIBE ccp4bb forename surname” in the message body. Additional options such as WITH DIGESTS can be added to the line (in this case to request a digest).
To subsequently remove yourself the same management tools are available, eg via email send
unsubscribe ccp4bb
to the same address.
More information is available at jiscmail help. If you want to change your email address on CCP4BB, or have some other request, send email to the list owner.
Retrieving old messages
Old messages can be browsed and searched at the list’s home page:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/ccp4bb.html
Other archives of CCP4bb messages are kept by various individuals around the world. We can make no promises of the reliability or availability of such archives.
Problems with CCP4bb
The most common reason for postings not appearing on CCP4bb is that the sender’s address doesn’t match any of those on the list of subscribers – either because they are not subscribed, or because they are subscribed but with a different address.
Other problems include being unable to subscribe or unsubscribe addresses, receiving multiple copies of the same posting, and receiving “out-of-office replies” in response to posting a message.
In all cases, if you are unable to resolve the problem yourself then please contact the CCP4 help desk at ccp4@ccp4.ac.uk. We are able to resolve most problems with CCP4bb quite easily.
Other mailing lists
In addition to the general CCP4bb list, CCP4 provides a specialised mailing list aimed at software developers, called CCP4-dev.