About the CompMed™ Community Platform

The CompMed listserv was migrated to the CompMed Community Platform on June 14, 2019. CompMed founder Dr. Ken Boschert is community administrator.

How to Join the CompMed Community

  • AALAS members will need to log into the community at community.aalas.org. As a reminder, your login is the same as your AALAS website login. Once you are logged in, look for the CompMed community and click the "Join" button. If you need assistance logging in, please send an email to info@aalas.org.
  • Non-AALAS members will need to register to join the CompMed community. Please download and follow the instructions on this form.

Why is an AALAS-member Sponsor Required for Non-AALAS Members to Join CompMed?

  • CompMed was hosted on the Listserv platform for 27 years. To join CompMed, applicants had to provide a reference of someone in the laboratory animal science field. Applicant and reference information was submitted by email versus being stored in a structured database with contact and demographic data. Because the new CompMed community platform is on an entirely different system, there is no feasible method of importing 27 years worth of email data into a structured database. Incidentally, this sponsorship requirement parallels AALAS's policy for joining AALAS.

What Are Some of the Changes with the New CompMed Community?

  • First, what will not change is the ability to send and receive posts directly from your email program. In other words, once you have joined, you don't have to log into the community to send or receive messages. You can use the email address AALAS-compmed@ConnectedCommunity.org to send messages
  • In addition to the discussion forum, the CompMed community will include a resource library for uploading or downloading files. Now you can share helpful documents with community colleagues.
  • There will also be a directory of community participants. This feature will enhance direct communication and networking with fellow participants.
  • The posting of meeting or events will no longer be allowed. Instead, meeting and event notices can be posted on the ACE Calendar or in the "Meetings & Events" community. AALAS members can join the "Meetings & Events" community at https://community.aalas.org/communities/allcommunities.
  • Job postings will no longer be allowed. Instead, job openings can be posted on AALAS Career Center. The reason why is because CompMed is a community for participants to provide their expertise, gain understanding, and learn from their peers. Job postings don’t encourage any of those interactions. The exclusion of job postings also will mean less clutter to sift through during archive searches. Job postings are in the spirit of a jobs board and rightfully where both job seekers and employers would think to go to find or post them.
  • The CompMed archives will still be hosted and accessible on Listserv until we find an acceptable alternative for accessing them.

CompMed™ Listserv was migrated to the new CompMed Community June 14, 2019

These FAQs pertain to the old CompMed listserv, not the new CompMed Community platform.

How do I find old CompMed™ listserv messages?

All contributions to this list are automatically archived in log files. Older files are listed monthly; newer files are archived weekly. You can search for old messages, or you can request log files from the listserver. To obtain the available archive files (containing messages from past months):

Send e-mail to: LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AALAS.ORG

Message body: INDEX COMPMED

To retrieve a specific monthly log file:

Send e-mail to: LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AALAS.ORG

Message body: GET COMPMED LOGxxxxx

(xxxxx representing the year, month & week; i.e., LOG9810b)


How do I unsubscribe from the old CompMed™ listserv?

Send e-mail to: LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AALAS.ORG

Message body: SIGNOFF COMPMED

If you have problems unsubscribing, send a message to COMPMED-REQUEST@LISTSERV.AALAS.ORG and someone will help you.


Why does the old CompMed listserv not respond to my commands?

One of the most common problems associated with the inability to get the listserver to respond to your administrative requests, like database searches, changing to digest, or temporarily stopping mail delivery, is that your e-mail address changed. In other words, sometime between when you first subscribed to CompMed™and the discovery of the problem, your e-mail address mutated to something different. Many computers use e-mail "aliases" so that your old address still works just fine for receiving mail, but the listserver only knows you by your old address and "thinks" your new address is alien and not part of the CompMed™group. Your commands get bounced back with some cryptic message to that effect. To set things straight, send an e-mail to COMPMED-REQUEST@LISTSERV.AALAS.ORG and someone will get back to you to help. Many times you are not aware of this subtle change in your e-mail address, but it happens all the time.

Second, although it is very desirable that you attach your e-mail address to messages you send to the CompMed™mailing list, it is not necessary and actually a small problem to send your "signature" file along to the listserver when using many of the administrative commands outlined above. Most e-mail software programs have the capability or option to temporarily turn off the signature when sending a message. It is generally a good idea to do this because the listserver thinks you are sending additional administrative commands and tries to interpret your signature as such. You will probably see the listserver's output indicate that the commands make no sense to it. No real harm done, but it can interfere with queries. You are just better off not sending your signature to the listserver.

You can also avoid this problem by separating your LISTSERV commands from your signature by // EOJ or even a couple of dashes --. The listserver will ignore all lines after the EOJ or dashes and will not be bothered by a signature file.