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The Scuba-UK and NDG mailing lists

(The archives are here)

The Drogon Network maintains 2 majordomo mailing lists of interest to UK Scuba divers. The lists are called Scuba-UK and NDG.

It is vitally important that you read and understand the following before subscribing to either list.

A brief history of the lists

The NDG list (Network Diving Group)

The NDG list started life on September 10th 1993 as uk-net-divers@fmg.bt.co.uk, run by Pete Young. It then moved machine and changed it's name to ndg@gssec.bt.co.uk. The original 5 members were Pete Young, Alan Wright, Callum Beveridge, Stuart Petch and myself. Alan took over control of the list when Pete changed jobs, then in October of 1994 I took over running of it and turned it from a simple alias expansion (which was starting t get out of control!) into a majordomo list. It's run more or less continuously since then, moving with me as I've changed jobs. Hopefully it can stay on the drogon.net address for as long as I hold that domain name.

I believe that the first NDG trip was organised by Alan Wright and involved a trip to Scotland, feeding the congers in Loch Long and diving some wrecks in the River Clyde and watching Alan who has no sense of smell drinking beer out of a 150 year old bottle recovered from the Wallachia! Sometime after that in June 1994, Pete arranged his first Eastbourne trip, and the rest they say is history...

Scuba-UK

The Scuba-UK list was a spin-off from the NDG list. It was created in November of 1994 as a forum for UK divers to voice their opinions and generally chat about diving conditions, equipment, etc. which are more applicable to the UK than rec.scuba was at the time. (There has since been a uk.rec.scuba group created). DO NOT post requests for hard-boat spaces, or advertisements for trip spaces, etc. to the Scuba-UK list. Please continue to use the NDG list for that.

Posting guidelines, an FAQ of sorts

It's important to note that the Scuba-UK list is NOT affiliated to any training agency whatsoever. Divers (and staff) from any agency are welcome to post and read.

Commercial Advertising, UCE and "SPAM"

Don't do it. It's as simple as that. Anyone caught sending SPAM to the lists will be dealt with. Very quickly you'll find yourself black-holed from my system as well as having your upstream ISP notified. I have to pay real money and spend my own time to maintain the system and I'm not having it used by free-loaders looking for a fast way to make some money. I know that there are some commercial hard-boat skippers out there and shop owners on the list and maybe you want to post an ad. for boat spaces or maybe equipment deals? Well - I will tolerate some advertising of this nature as long as you understand the basic philosophy of "give a little, take a little". If you are a skipper and regularly contribute to discussions and one day you have some spaces to fill then feel free (on the NDG list, of course), but if you never contribute to discussions, then I don't want to know about your commercial spaces. I don't really want to see "for sale" messages from shop keepers. Private sales, yes, commercial, not really unless it's a bloody good deal! If you do post a for-sale notice, make sure it's clearly marked as such in the subject and PLEASE only post a very brief description and either request that people email you privately or provide a pointer to a web site.

Cross-posting to both Scuba-UK and NDG

Don't do it. Since the 2 lists are for completely different things, there should never be a need to post to both lists. By all means, use the NDG list to arrange trips, inform people of anything you need for a particular trip and, of course post the trip report afterwards, but don't post trip spaces, or requests for spaces on Scuba-UK.

Believe it or not, not everyone subscribes to both lists. There are people on NDG who aren't on Scuba-UK and vice-versa.

Etiquette

Posting private email to a public forum is considered to be very bad mannered at best so don't do it. Please learn how your email program handles replys and check and double check the Cc: list before you hit send. If you reply to a post and your mailer sets the To: address to be that of the sender, check that this is what you intend. If the senders address and the scuba-uk address appears in your outgoing headers then that person will get 2 copies of your post. Maybe you should just post back to the list and not to the person concerned. Also, if you intend a private reply, make sure the list address isn't in your headers! I've tried various combinations of setting the Reply-To: field and changing the sender field and I don't think there is a solution that will please everyone, so the best plan is to learn how your own email system works and use it properly.

When replying to a message, please make the effort to trim the message as necessary - remove any signatures and the footer that the mailing list add automatically (and try to keep your own signatures to a reasonable size!), remove any parts of the text that might not be relevant to your reply, but do keep enough of the original text to maintain a proper context and always keep any attribution lines so the original author is still mentioned.

Posting binaries, HTML or MIME attachments

Don't do it. Some people (like myself) still use a mail program which only understands plain text. Some people (like myself) use a mail program thats limited to an 80 column screen, and although my mail program will wrap lines, some peoples wont, so if your outgoing message isn't formatted with line breaks then all these people will see is the first 80 characters of (possibly each paragraph) of your message.

Make sure your outgoing email is in plain text and is NOT sent as HTML and is NOT sent as a MIME attachment.

If you want to post a picture, it's far better to put it on a web server somewhere and post the URL. Then only the people who really want to see the picture will be able to. If you are desperately stuck for web space, let me know and I might arrange to put the picture on my web server for you.

Subscribing and Unsubscribing

It's very important that you send all list requests to and not to the list! Sending a subscribe or unsubscribe request to or won't accomplish anything other than to irritate the current list members, especially those who pay to receive their email (at home via dial-up, or other paying service).

To subscribe to the list, put

    subscribe scuba-uk
and/or
    subscribe ndg
in the BODY of a message and send it to You should NOT specify your email address. If your mailer is setup correctly, then Majordomo will work it out for you. Similarly, to unsubscribe, send
    unsubscribe scuba-uk
and/or
    unsubscribe ndg
in the BODY of a message and send it to

To post to the Scuba-UK list, simply send email to To post to the NDG list, you have to send to because the original address seems to have been picked up by spammers. An alternative way to post to the NDG list is to fill out this form.

Scuba-UK daily digest

Scuba-UK can sometimes be quite a busy list (over 20 messages a day is not unusual, although the norm seems to be a dozen or so. Because of this, it's also available in a daily digest form. to subscribe to the digest, send
    subscribe scuba-uk-digest
in the body of a message sent to as before. You probably don't want to subscribe to both lists at the same time! The digest is posted at 7pm UK time every evening, or when the total size of that days messages exceeds 80K bytes. (Which doesn't happen that often)

The digest isn't any smaller than all the days messages, but it might be more convenient to get all messages in one lump than a stream of messages throughout the day, and I believe that there many offline readers which work with this digest format allowing you to read and reply at your leisure.

Subscribing an email address different to the one you're posting from

It may be that you need to subscribe an email address that is different to the address you are posting from, (eg. perhaps you have a local expansion list and want to subscribe this to the list rather than each local person), in this case you should put the email address you wish to subscribe AFTER the subscribe (or unsubscribe) command. This is the ONLY time you ever need to specify an email address I have to manually approve such requests and if you are specifying an email address which is the same as the email address you posted from then I'll ignore your request because my life is too short to hand feed people who can't read the simple instructions.

Click here to access the NDG and Scuba-UK archives

Gordon Henderson