It's an easy way to email the entire club with a single message, without having to remember everyone's email addresses.
Not really. It's fairly low traffic, with maybe a few messages a week. Traffic will occasionally spike to higher levels during a protracted discussion (such as the recent Constitution rewrite); rest assured if said discussion only involves two people arguing, they will be asked to take it off list.
You'll see messages from people looking for players for, or someone who can bring a copy of, a particular game. RPG groups also organize using the list. You'll also see the occasional administrative message from one of the officers or the advisor. Realistically, the list can be used for anything related to games or gaming. We do however try to keep the list on-topic. The list isn't moderated, but the list owners do frown on people sending messages to the games club list that, for instance, ask if anyone wants to go see the latest cult classic movie. If you want to sell a bunch of your stuff on the list, that's probably all right - you can send one message, and make sure you indicate that replies should be sent to you off the list. If you're organizing a game, that's OK. Replies that are just "I'm in" or "I'm not" should be sent to the organizer (since that's not really interesting to everyone else on the list), but the organizer sending out periodic updates on location/number of players signed up is OK.
Basically, try to keep posts to the list to things that don't have a targeted recipient or group of recipients. If a particular thread is getting significantly off-topic, please email the list owners (owner-gamers-l@cornell.edu) and they will address the situation. Floods of messages about how a particular topic isn't interesting and are spamming the list only serve to spam the list even more.
Send an email to lyris@cornell.edu with no subject and the following line of text in the body:
join gamers-l "Your Name"
Replace the words Your Name with your name. The quotes are required. So, if your name is Abrahamo Lincolni, and you want to join the list, you'd send an email to lyris@cornell.edu, leaving the subject line blank, and putting only this line of text in the body:
join gamers-l "Abrahamo Lincolni"
As of early September 2011, replies to the list will go to the person you are replying to, not to the entire list. If you want to copy the list on your reply (see above for when not to do this) a "Reply All" should do the trick.
Send an email to lyris@cornell.edu with no subject and the following line of text in the body:
leave gamers-l
Longtime members will note that you now have to email "lyris" instead of "listproc" and that the command names have changed to "join" and "leave".
The Games Club mailing list has been around since before CIT required the use of "-l" to denote a mailing list, and is one of the four lists from that era still active today. So, until recently, you could just email "gamers" and get the list. Unfortunately, with the advent of new mandated mailing list technology, we had to change the name of the list to "gamers-l" to meet new CIT standards.
No, anyone who was on the "gamers" list was automatically subscribed to the "gamers-l" list.