The moderator simply tries to review submissions with respect to the guidelins, and get them approved and posted as quickly as possible. If the submission is formatted strangely or is incurably ugly, we probably will bounce it back. The turnaround normally is just a day or so. If, however, the moderator gets called out of town or tied up in a project, it might be a couple of days. The level of traffic on austin.announce is very light.
Some people look at that and think since the group is so small, nobody reads it.
They think it might be better to use a big group, such as austin.general, for their announcements. In fact, the opposite is true. Your announcement doesn't have to fight for attention among 60 other messages complaining about drivers on Mo-Pac or the lunkheads in City Hall. When you use austin.announce, you do not have to run a gauntlet of killfiles to get your announcement seen. The announcement was posted on a Saturday morning.