The CR Society's has transitioned to a web forum for discussions and communicating:

• Forum Site

The CR Society's previous main form of communication is email, via mailing lists. There are three lists and the Best of CR service: (note: best of CR is not currently maintained)

• crsociety -- oldest, most popular amongst experienced CR practitioners
• crcommunity -- a newer list featuring discussion of more personal, less strictly CR-related topics. Also good for newcomers.

Main List (crsociety)

The CR Society started as an internet mailing list. This list, crsociety, has for many years been the principal means of communication for members, and is a rich source of information about the theory and practice of Calorie restriction.

You can search the archives for messages posted since the mailing list was created in 1995. This is especially useful for researching specific topics or postings by a particular author. We actually think it's a good idea for people new to the diet, or to the List, to browse the archives a bit. Start at the beginning of the archives (way down at the bottom of the page, once you've followed the above link). Search for Since and Until="April 1995" and just read for a while! It's a great way to get to know something about various members' experience with the diet.

You can join the list and receive all posts individually (about 40 per day) or in various digest forms (one combined message per day). Please read the list rules before posting.

The format called "Digest (HTML format) [HTML DIGEST]" has a nice table of contents and will probably be most satisfactory unless your email program is quite old.

To unsubscribe from the email list:

1. Go to Join or leave the CRSOCIETY list
2. Enter your email address and click "Leave the list."
3. Wait one to fifteen minutes for a "confirmation request" email message to arrive in your Inbox. (Steps 3 and 4 prevent someone else from unsubscribing
   you without permission.)
4. Click on the link in the confirmation request to complete the unsubscription process.

If the volume of mail is too large, you may wish to use one of the digest formats instead.

CRSociety list rules

By subscribing to the crsociety list, you agree to give me the right to archive all of your posts.

Subject Matter of The List

The principal topic of the List is, of course, Calorie Restriction. Closely related matters may also be discussed. These include:

• Theories of aging (especially as they might illuminate the mechanisms of CR).
• Nutrition, insofar as it might bear on food choices for people on CR.
• Questions of how other life-extension regimens might interact with CR.
• Tips on staying on the diet, managing hunger, managing social situations in which CR can be challenging, and other practical matters, even food preparation.
• Announcements of breakthrough findings in anti-aging medicine (even if they have nothing to do with CR -- after all, almost all of us will want to hear about such findings, and a true breakthrough might make some of us modify our CR).

Discussions on subjects which do not clearly fall into one of these categories should be reserved for the CR Community list or other forums, public or private. The Usenet group, Sci.life-extension, for example, generally allows a wider range of topics to be discussed. Those who repeatedly fail to follow the content rule will have their posts automatically held for review before being sent on to the List.

Trimming Article Lengths

Many people tend to quote whole articles to which they're replying. Often mail software assumes this is what you want to do, and thus puts the full article to which one is replying in the message composition window. We have to pay for space to store the archived articles (as do the other people who might be archiving them). Please try to restrict quoting to the points of articles to which you wish to respond. Better still: don't quote the articles at all! Write as if you were writing with pen and paper, for example: "Sue, nice point about glucose. But it might be worth it to consider [...]." Those who repeatedly fail to follow this rule will have their posts automatically held for review before being sent on to the List.

"Signature" Files

General "netiquette rules" (for example: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html) suggest a sig file of no more than four short lines, and we use this as our guideline. Signature files are to be restricted to a maximum length of four lines, and should appear only in the footer at the bottom of a post. This rule applies to all CR Society lists, including the main list ("crsociety") and the community list ("crcommunity")

Unreadable messages

Messages that are empty and/or contain unreadable formatting will generally be disallowed on any CR Society List

Posting Medline And Other Abstracts of Published Articles

To the best of our knowledge, this is illegal. Please don't do it, since you would be (possibly) forcing anyone archiving posts to break the law. It is probably best to post a summary of a new study, then append the URL for the Medline abstract. Part of what's good about doing it this way, is that it's easy for someone to find related articles (by clicking on "related articles," in Medline).

Copyright material

This is illegal. Copyright protects “original works of authorship” that are fixed in a tangible form of expression. The fixation need not be directly perceptible so long as it may be communicated with the aid of a machine or device. If you want to reprint all or part of an article, you must ask for and receive permission from the copyright owner.

People Being Automatically Unsubscribed.

The software is set to unsubscribe people automatically if mail to them bounces more than a few times. The List managers don't have time to unsubscribe all the people who cancel Internet accounts but don't unsubscribe from lists before doing so. The down-side is that people whose mail is simply screwing-up temporarily will be canned, too. My plan: Take a look at the "bounce messages" and (try to) contact people at accounts that still exist but might have just temporarily been having problems. We won't be able to do this more than once a week or so. If you have a shaky email account, just remember that a long silence from the CR Society probably means that your mail had problems for long enough that you were automatically unsubscribed.

List Privacy Policy

Any information beyond what you choose to reveal in the messages you yourself send to the List is known only to the President of the CR Society, Brian M. Delaney, and the two List administrators, Tim C, and J. Wright. They will not give any information about membership in the List to anyone, unless compelled by law.

CR Community (crcommunity)

The crcommunity list is for discussion of more personal, less strictly CR-related topics than are permitted on crsociety. Those new to CR, or those interested in confabulating more freely and loosely than the serious scientific atmosphere of crsociety permits, might want to consider joining this list.

To join this new list -- or, for that matter, to leave! -- click here, and follow the simple instructions. The various capabilities of the list software are identical to those of crsociety. (For example, you can search the archives in the same way you would with crsociety.) The name of the list is the only difference.

This new list is, for the time being, moderated. Please aim for kindness and respect.