Contact

The Menu Bar reads everything sent to it, and answers what needs answering. The magazine is small by design, which is another way of saying the reply may take a day or two and will come from the person who wrote the guides. The address is [email protected], and it is the only address the magazine uses.

What to write about

Corrections come first: a wrong date, a misnamed command, a price quoted badly, a step that no longer matches the current system, the magazine would rather know within the hour than carry a mistake politely. Story ideas come second, especially Australian angles the international coverage misses, a category of software worth a guide, a corner of Mac history with a local record. Questions about the guides are welcome when specific: the page in question, the step that failed, what the machine did instead. Vague questions get honest attempts, but specific ones get useful answers.

What happens to a story idea

Good suggestions become guides, and the pipeline is simple. An idea that fits a department joins a working list; when it reaches the top, the research happens first, the archives and documentation are read, and only then is the guide written, which is why suggestions sometimes take weeks to surface as pages rather than days. The person who suggested a subject is not credited unless they ask to be, because most readers prefer otherwise, but the suggestion is remembered and the result usually carries the shape of the question that prompted it. Ideas the magazine cannot do properly are declined with a reason rather than left in silence.

Response times, honestly stated

Mail is read within a day or two on ordinary weeks. Corrections jump the queue, because a live error costs readers daily, and a note saying simply that something is wrong on a page is acted on before its details are debated. Longer conversations, story pitches with history attached, permissions questions, take longer, sometimes a week, and the magazine would rather send one considered reply than three quick ones. If a month passes with nothing, write again: mail systems lose things, and no silence from this address is ever a verdict.

What this address cannot help with

Because of the domain's history, mail sometimes arrives looking for the previous tenant. This magazine has no connection to MacSOS Pty Ltd, the Sydney software house that published SyBrowser, MacAT and Risky Business SOS until around 2019; it cannot recover registration codes, unlock old software, renew licences or forward messages to the former publisher. The full position is stated on the about page, and the company's own record is kept, read only, in the story of this domain. Support questions about products named on this site should go to their current publishers, whose documentation is the right door, and readers hunting a lost registration from the shareware era will find the era explained in the shareware history, including where those processors went.

Permissions and republication

Short quotations from the guides, with a visible link back to the page quoted, are welcome and need no permission. Longer republication, translations included, is usually granted for non commercial purposes if asked first, and the answer to a well written request is almost always yes with a condition or two. Systematic copying of the site, scraping, or republishing pages under another name is not something the magazine permits, and the terms are set out plainly in the legal notice rather than negotiated by ambush.

A note on courtesy

Attachments are not opened unless their arrival was agreed by mail first, and links in unsolicited promotional mail are not followed, a habit that protects both sides of the correspondence. Nothing sent to the magazine is published without permission, and nothing is added to any list, because there is no list. Readers pointing out an error are thanked in the correction note by first name unless they ask not to be, and readers who would rather stay anonymous can say so and be believed. Press enquiries are answered as story ideas are: within a day or two, in writing, with the same preference for facts over atmosphere that the guides themselves carry.