[sdiy] message board

[Scott Gravenhorst]

Been to Yahoo groups - don't like 'em.  Mostly because of ads, but I
agree with others here who mention subject fragmentation and the
requirement to do searches with inadequate and slow search engines.

Quite honestly, I don't see a "huge" pile of email coming from SDIY.  I
find it quite easy to manage because people on this list kindly use
sufficiently verbose and rather accurate subject lines making it easy
to ignore threads that don't interest me.  [thank you - you know who
you are]

The whole reply vs. reply to all is not even an issue.  I got used to
it and I agree with those who say it's better this way because it
removes opportunities to embarrass the hell out of yourself by sending
a personal message to the list.

I will also occasionally use ASCII art to render a tiny schematic.  It
works and it's bandwidth lean enough that nobody complains.

Web space is free enough that one can post URLs to uploaded docs and
images within an email.  

The idea of a promised attachment store that doesn't exist degrades the
Yahoo forum usefulness even more.  (I wondered why I couldn't see the
attachments... now I know)

Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Mail as free entities exist as a bait mechanism
to get you to view numerous ads.  It is the _advertisements_ that are
most important to Yahoo, NOT the content of those forums.  The ONLY
reason Yahoo has any content at all is to attract advertising dollars.
 Period.  It is NOT there because they are being such wonderful
community stewards.  And I've already got enough sh!t running in my
system that I object fiercely to the "need" for something like admuncher.

Last, but certainly not least, I agree with the person who mentioned
being able to easily generate a personalized archive of specific posts
of interest.  If you've ever touched an interesting website and simply
bookmarked it only to find that months later the site is *gone*, you'll
understand why people like me archive information on local hard drives.
 There's nothing more annoying than knowing something is out there and
being unable to access it.  Now, I keep local copies of EVERYTHING I
use.  When I need it, it's there.

Long live plain text messages.
Long live SDIY and the FPGA-Synth email lists.

-- ScottG

-------------------------------------------------------------

-- Scott Gravenhorst
-- GateMan I - Xilinx Spartan-3E Based MIDI Synthesizer
-- FatMan: home1.gte.net/res0658s/fatman/
-- NonFatMan: home1.gte.net/res0658s/electronics/
-- When the going gets tough, the tough use the command line.