[FOM] Andrej Bauer's "rejected posts" and the closing of a thread

[Martin Davis]

In general I discourage meta-discussions on FOM, but precisely 
because Andrej Bauer was such a valued member of the FOM community 
that I hated to lose, and because there were such strong feelings, I 
thought it best to air it all.

First I want to explain that only in egregious cases do I reject a 
message without consulting the editorial board. Likewise I don't 
close a thread without consulting them. I do sometimes ask that a 
message be rewritten to avoid derogatory language I find inappropriate.

I am 85 years old, and my memory is not to be trusted, but to the 
best of my recollection I haven't rejected any of Andrej Bauer's post 
for quite some time. It used to be the case that I did reject 
messages that contained any HTML code (which modern email programs 
tend to include by default along with a plain text version) insisting 
on the plain text we require. I stopped rejecting messages for this 
reason when I found that the "mailman" program that FOM uses is now 
configured to automatically delete the HTML component from messages 
that include such.

I suspect strongly that the messages Andrej Bauer complained as 
having been rejected for reasons he found incomprehensible were 
rejected because of an HTML component. In such cases my rejection 
message included a sample of the HTML source code. If this is indeed 
what happened it was quite a while ago.

I would be delighted if Andrej Buer were to reconsider.

Martin

I suspect that the rejections Andrej Bauer comnplains of

Martin Davis
Professor Emeritus, Courant-NYU
Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley
eipye + 1 = 0
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