The Digest is a grassroots forum, deriving all content (and hence usefulness) from its subscribers. The Digest is moderated at a very low-level, and rarely edited or censored in any way, and so the overriding guideline for content is constructiveness. Simply put, if you have something constructive to say that is suitable for pleasant, civilized conversation, then it is welcome, otherwise it is not. If you have something to say that you wouldn't feel comfortable saying to somebody's face, then it is probably not going to be welcome in the Digest either. We also try to maintain a rating somewhere near "G - suitable for audiences of all ages". Language and concepts not suitable to such a rating will also be treated with prejudice in the moderation of the Digest - arguments that young children should not be brewing notwithstanding, the Digest, its archives and its website are readily available to all over the internet. And, finally, in agreement with standard network policy, crass commercialism is frowned upon. So much so, that it will not be allowed to publish.

If a contributor does not adhere to this guideline, I suggest that s/he be deluged with *private* flames. We, the janitors, will not bar anyone from receiving the Digest, and will only affect those posts that are obvious spam, chain letters, blatantly non-beer related, duplicate (identically) posts and those in obvious discord with Digest policy and/or guidelines (See the moderation guidelines on the hbd.org web site for details). In other words, "government" of the Digest will be minimal, and, for the most part, the subscribers have to police themselves in order to maintain the Digest's record of lots of signal and little noise.

Requests for back issues, archives, cat's meow, instructions for ftp, etc., will be silently discarded. There are simply too many subscribers to provide personal service to each one. Removal requests are handled automatically, but only if submitted from the address being unsubscribed, and only if your e-mail address has not changed between the time you subscribed and the time you unsubscribe. Remember that there are lots of redistribution points for the Digest, so we may not be able to delete your address. And, if you have subscribed to the Digest via some listserver you *must* unsubscribe the same way! Remember to include your *name* in all requests so we have a better chance of finding you in the list should the automation fail. Change of address is handled by first unsubscribing from the first address, then resubscribing from the new address. Please do not ask the Janitors to change your address for you. Remember that most correspondence sent to homebrew-request will probably not be answered unless specifically requested.

Requests should be sent to the *request* address (homebrew-request), and articles should only be sent to the Digest address (homebrew). Articles sent to the request address will normally be deleted. Requests sent to the publication address will be handled as quickly as we notice them. Please, please, check your reply address before mailing something here! Also, be sure the e-mail address has been entered correctly in your mail client's configuration. Most problems are due to "spam-proofing", typos, and no entry in the reply to and/or "from" fields.

Articles having line lengths greater than 80 characters, or being larger than 8k will automatically be rejected by the Digest 'bot. So, please limit the size of articles to less than 8k and limit line lengths to 80 characters. Also please limit the size of your signature to save valuable Digest real estate, and try to give your articles useful subjects lines. (We reserve the right to edit out long signatures should we be cruising the in-basket and spot one...) Please reserve the ASCII art for illustrating brewing concepts. Mugs, kilroys, eagles, etc in your signature do nothing but waste bandwidth. Be sure your mailer isn't generating extraneous characters to waste bandwidth. In particular, be sure to set any multi-part MIME option to generate nothing but plain ascii - definitely no HTML!!! Posts duplicating themselves (within themselves) will be refused by the janitors to be edited and resubmitted by the posters (sounds like school, doesn't it?). You can save the janitors and yourself a lot of time and grief by properly setting your mailer! Last, but not least, be sure you send only ONE copy of your post to the Digest. If you don't receive a response from the AutoMailer right away, look at your From and ReplyTo addresses to determine that it is correct and reachable. If they are, wait a bit before resubmitting. Sometimes it can take a while to reach you across the net...

Thanks for helping to make the Digest better for everyone!