TO: All GCN Circular Recipients 11 Nov 01 RE: New Subject-line filtering categories I have added more strings to the list of acceptable (and required) strings that can (must) appear in the Subject-line of all GCN Circular submissions. The new additions are: "XRF", "FXT", "XTR", "XRT", "SAX", and "VLA". I was asked by members of the list to the add the "XRF", "FXT", "XTR" strings. And I pro-actively added the "XRT", "SAX", and "VLA" strings to handle probable future observational activities. The later two will typically look like: "SAX J1234+7654". Recent events (the SAX-WFC x-ray rich transient on 01/10/30) have prompted this expansion of acceptable strings in the Subject-line list. Please note that the "HETE" string was added to the list about a month ago. This was added to handle the case when the identity of a specific trigger was not yet known to be a GRB (eg HETE Trig 1234). The full list of case-sensitive accepted strings is: String Acronym Expansion Comment GRB Gamma Ray Burst grb Gamma Ray Burst SGR Soft Gamma-ray Repeater HETE High Energy Transient Explorer XRF X-Ray Flash FXT Fast X-ray Transient XTR ?????? XRT X-Ray Transient SAX Satellite per Astronomia X VLA Very Large Array Please be advised that this expansion (albeit needed) will, on some occasions, cause the scripts that process Circulars into the ongoing concatenated files for each burst to fail -- the "J1234+7654" names are incompatible with the GRByymmdd names (in some cases). These occurrences will require human intervention (and therefore some delay) to add the latest Circular to the concatenated file. But this is ONLY for the updating of the concatenated web archive files -- there is no delay for the distribution of the Circulars to the recipient list. It is useful to know why there is this requirement for the strings in the Subject-line. Some recipients use 'vacation' programs to reply to all incoming email while they are away from their offices/accounts. Since these replies are sent from their accountname@dacountdomain back to the gcncirc account, they would be treated as new submissions if it were not for the checking of these strings. Of course even this safeguard fails for those 'vacation' programs that put the incoming subject-line in the outgoing reply subject-line. And this is why it is important that these 'vacation' programs be configured to use the Reply-to field instead of the From-field. If the traffic in these new categories gets larger than people are willing to tolerate, then I can/will implement category-based filtering for each person. I would appreciate feedback from the community on this aspect. Do you feel it is: very much needed, maybe needed, not needed, don't care. Reply to: scott@lheamail.gsfc.nasa.gov Sincerely, Scott Barthelmy, GCN OPS Scott Barthelmy NASA-GSFC, Code 661, Greenbelt, MD 20771 PHONE: 301-286-3106 (work) FAX: 301-286-1684 (1st choice, -1682 2nd choice) EMAIL: scott@lheamail.gsfc.nasa.gov PAGER: 3016472666@alphapage.airtouch.com (by email, ~200 characters/message) WEB: http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn