Traveller Mailing List

The Traveller Mailing List is a list-serve-style mailing list available for free through the Internet for subscribers to discuss in a civilized way any matter they wish to that relates to Traveller. It is often referred to by it's acronym, TML.

Participation

New subscribers to the TML are urged to lurk (i.e., just read the posts by others for a considered period of time and refrain from making their own posts) until they feel a good understanding for what is considered acceptable or not.

The TML is a very active mailing list, sometimes reaching as many as 100 new posts in just one day, but usually only dozens per day. Often, posts will be long and complex, but most are short. In recent years, there is between one megabyte and five megabytes of text posted each month. Most subscribers just read and never (or very rarely) write posts of their own.

To subscribe to the Traveller Mailing List, one can visit Travellerrpg.com on the Web. This Web site also sells various commercial products for Traveller, it provides hosting services for the TML as a courtesy to the Traveller community at large.

Archives are freely available at the same Web site that manages subscriptions (Travellerrpg.com), and can be downloaded as plain text. The archives are also searchable and sortable on the Web site. The TML has moved homes from one host on the Internet to another several times over the years, and its hosts have been affected by occasional technical catastrophes. As of this writing, archives are only available from December of 2002 to present.

A subscriber can choose to skip getting each individual post and get all of each day's posts concatenated together in one "digest"-style post for that day. It is problematical whether this saves time or not.

Many past and current contributors to official Traveller publications participate on, or at least subscribe to, the list. Some published Traveller authors began first by participating in the TML and fanzines sometimes for years before entering discussions to publish new material. Most of these writers continue to participate on, or at least subscribe to, the list. They often become less active on the list after they've published.

Participants on the list often refer to themselves as "TML denizens", as "TMLers", as "TML citizens", and as Travellers.

Although a majority of TMLers have at least some familiarity with most of the versions of Traveller that have been published over the years, most TMLers have strong preferences about which version(s) they prefer, and often which version(s) they strongly dislike. For the most part, TMLers agree to politely disagree with each other about preferred/disliked versions and respect the preferences of others without trying to impose their own preferences. Other TMLers usually politely ignore any outburst of venting from one of their fellow Travellers about the perceived failings of some version they dislike, and all TMLers are expected to avoid such outbursts. Good-natured teasing is slightly more acceptable, but also expected to be done with great care and tact, since misunderstandings between strangers and hurt or inflamed feelings easily occur in a fast-flowing and purely text medium like a mailing list.

FAQ

The most recently published FAQ for the TML stopped being maintained circa 2000, during one of the occasional catastrophes that forced a change of mailing list host and administrators. The rules of behavior for the TML are unwritten and determined by consensus, with the standards strongly influenced by the now-gone FAQ. Foul language is very frowned upon, as are personal attacks or insults to others. A few debates that lasted a long time without being settled one way or the other but led to often volatile emotions are informally banned from discussion now. This is because nobody wants a repeat of the lengthy and loud debates that stirred up a lot of discontent but never changed anyone's opinion now matter how carefully the debates were examined. Most famously banned are:

• the viability of piracy or even the mere existence of pirates at all or what form piracy might take if it does exist;
• the existence or possibility of constructing "jump torpedoes" or any other unmanned craft capable of FTL jumps;
• accelerating some large mass such as a spaceship or asteroid long enough to achieve extraordinarily high speeds and then crashing these ultrahighspeed masses onto the surface of a planet causing far more destruction than any hydrogen bomb could (these are often referred to as near-C rocks, because their speed putatively could approach "C", the astrophysical constant that is the speed of light; and
• there are other more-or-less forbidden topics, this is not intended to be a complete list.

Popular TML Terms and Slang

There is a fairly large number of acronyms in common use on the TML, as well as some slang. There is no currently-maintained FAQ for subscribers, although a few of the Traveller fan sites on the Web have partial lists of popular terms. At the least, a TMLer will need to be familiar with the terms [CT], [MT], [TNE], [T4], [G:T], [T20], and [T5] as the names of various versions of Traveller over the years. Those acronyms refer, respectively, to what was called at the time just "Traveller" (the very first version, published from 1977 through 1987) but is usually now referred to as Classic Traveller, MegaTraveller, Traveller: The New Era, Marc Miller's Traveller, GURPS: Traveller, D20 Traveller, and T5 is the name of the next version of Traveller which Marc Miller himself is writing but has not yet published. Also the terms IMTU, IYTU, and the OTU, which respectively stand for In My Traveller Universe, In Your Traveller Universe, and the Official Traveller Universe.

"Listmom" is the usual term for one of the administrators of the TML, the people who keep it running, and who have the power to ban someone from the list, which has happened only extremely rarely.

"ObTrav" is short for "obligatory Traveller reference". Since all posts are at least supposed to be directly related to Traveller, TMLers who make seemingly unrelated posts try to rescue the post by tagging an ObTrav onto the beginning or end that is more or less related to both Traveller and the other material in their post. A typical example is the TMLer who posts about some criminal act they read about in the news, then adds an ObTrav suggesting an adventure seed inspired by that news item.

"Newbie essays" are sometimes assigned as a sort of initiation rite by any TMLer who feels like it to any new person who appears on the list. Sometimes the newbies even write and post their newbie essays. The creativity put into devising essay topics is often a source of great amusement. The creativity and work put into writing the actual essay always causes great admiration and increased acceptance and respect. Sometimes assigned topics are so creative and involved that it just isn't feasible to attempt to write such an essay, no matter how tongue in cheek. Sometimes they demand familiarity with licensed publications that are truly obscure and extremely difficult to obtain, also making them unfeasible.

"Canon" means a published, licensed Traveller book that is designated by Marc Miller as being authoritative and accurate in its rules and other statements about the Traveller Universe. So many products were licensed over the years, under various conditions, and by a series of people responsible for ownership of licensing rights. The canonicity of many products is uncertain at best, even though were legally licensed Traveller material at the time of their publication. With so many different editors, designers, authors, and license holders publishing material over many years, it isn't hard to find flat-out contradictions between statements in different material if one cares to look for them. When GDW closed its doors, all copyrights to Traveller reverted to Marc Miller, who had left GDW a few years before. He has tried to be careful about canonicity of all products he has licensed since that time. Most TMLers feel that canonicity exists in degrees, which cannot be easily quantified, and is at least partly subjective and a matter of preferences.

TMLers come from many countries around the world. Most of the English-speaking countries in the world are represented on the list, but not all. Most active TMLers from non-English-speaking countries are relatively fluent in English as their second language. Slang native to a TMLers home country is sometimes used, and TMLers will sometimes use references to events or people in their home countries that others might not recognize. TMLers from the United States, for example, sometimes forget things like Thanksgiving not being a holiday elsewhere, or that election day isn't the same for others, or that laws and politics are different elsewhere. In fact, some TML posters seem to not realize that people from other countries than their own also subscribe to the list. Tolerance and patience are the prevailing responses to such posts.

The countries most represented on the list are the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. India is a seemingly under-represented English-speaking country. There is a scattering of relatively active TMLers from Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Nobody knows how many other countries are also represented.

History of the TML

The Traveller Mailing List traces its origins at least to Genie in the 1980s, one of the online services that were popularly used before public access to the Internet became available, and for a period of time afterwards. (The other major public online services prior to the Internet were CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online.) Genie was an early online gathering place for Traveller enthusiasts and some Traveller authors, where they had a fairly well organized forum.

The TML was hosted in at least a couple of different places on the Internet in the years after it left Genie. Its primary listmom usually also changed hands when the list changed hosts. Some catastrophe, as yet unknown, befell its host circa 1999 and since that time it has been hosted by travellercentral.com followed by travellerrpg.com, where it is currently hosted.