So there are various opinions and problems about the One True Way to reply
to list messages, what to include and what to leave out, who's not talking
to whom, etc.
One way to make these issues disappear is to use a web based forum. I'm just
guessing, but I would say that these days the number of folks who have
Internet access but no web capability is fairly low. If you don't know
anything about a web based forum, you can go to http://www.team.net/the-local
and click on the "Forums" link in the menu box on the upper left of the
screen. There hasn't been much activity there, though I think that many of
the various Team.Net folks would find it better than the email lists.
I'm also involved with the Utah region of the SCCA, and host their web site
and email lists. With that group, the email list sees maybe 3 or 4 messages
per month, but the web forum is pretty busy, quite the opposite of Team.Net.
Check out http://utahscca.com click on the Forums -> General Discussion
buttons in the top menu bar. Ignore any blatherings from puttputt about
the upcoming pirate themed beach party ;-)
With email, a copy of each and every message is sent to all the subscribers
whether they want it or not, filling up their mailboxes a bit more as well
as creating some number of bounce messages traveling about due to various
circumstances. You might be surprised to see how many places reject email
that mentions one popular online auction site as spam. Lately that has been
slowing down, luckily, though you probably don't want to know how many
spam messages I have to deal with on a daily basis.
With the web forum, one copy of the mesage is kept on the server, and is only
sent over the wire to those who request it, when they request it. All the
recent messages are right there, one should be able to easily follow the
various trains of thought. One need not worry about reply vs. reply-all or
editing included text.
Of course, using a web forum is not perfect. Those who are infatuated with
the sound of their own keyboard clicking will still be as loquatious, those
with marginal literacy skills will still display marginal literacy skills,
not much that technology can do about that.
But the forum approach can reduce the administrative work on my part, can
reduce some of the email related complaints of others, and the web site
also gives people a place to put pictures and such that they can't send through
the email list. And the wiki setup at the-local has a number of other features
which may or may not be of use. What I really need to do some day when I have
some free time is figure out the calendar stuff, it could be real helpful to
have people be able to add various events to inform others of what is going
on in the LBC world. I should check and see if anyone has ever used the
chat rooms. Those might be useful for, say, sessions right after the end
of "Fear Factor" to argue about which ones were original and which ones
were bolt-ons.
So just for grins, I added a spridgets forum to http://www.team.net/the-local
Let's see what happens.
mjb.
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