MOTM

Well, so far, it seems many people are interested in maintaining the
list.  Obviously, starting another discussion forum wouldn't mean the
end of the yahoo group; the archive would remain here (as long as
yahoo doesn't tank, etc), and the discussion could remain alive.  The
advantage of a web forum is that it would be privately controlled, the
archive of messages/posts/topics could be kept secure.  Various people
could keep copies of it, so if the hosting were to die for some
reason, the forums could always be maintained.

HERE, however, is the problem:  I have no desire to damage or split
the community.  Just because *I* think web-based forums are a good
idea clearly doesn't mean everyone does.  There's something very nice
about a mailing list, getting your daily MOTM chatter fix straight to
your e-veins, heh.  I prefer the managed, categorized stuff you get
with forums; following a thread is a whole lot easier, and you can
also believe the ads would be *much* less prevalent.

But if, say, 20% of the regular contributors to the MOTM mailing list
decided they liked forums, they might stop contributing to the mailing
list, and that would be a problem.  As I said, I don't want to degrade
the MOTM discussion community, or even split it.  Yeah, web forums are
browsable via lynx, or elinks/links, or any other of a number of text
browsers, but it's not the same as using pine/whatever your mail
client of choice is.  

Still, if it's possible for paul to assign subdomains to other IP
addresses, I think having a forums.synthtech.com would be great.  But
again, that's just me, and I happen to host several forums.  I like
being able to tell when a topic has activity just by glancing at it,
etc.  Yeah, it would be marginally less attractive for *nix
console-only users, but not really much 'worse' than an e-mail list,
simply not as much of an 'improvement' as you get with a GUI browser.

My Two Cents, your exchange rates may vary.


--- In motm@yahoogroups.com, "Adam Schabtach" <adam@s...> wrote:
> I personally rather dislike Yahoo groups, but at this stage it seems
kind of
> pointless to move the MOTM discussion elsewhere. As it currently
stands, it
> offers a variety of delivery forms (digest, single messages, HTML or
not,
> web-based or email) so people can pick something that should be more
or less
> acceptable to their personal whims and needs. Switching to some
service that
> didn't provide all of these formats would be a step backwards. Also,
all of
> the past traffic on this list is archived at the Yahoo site; it
represents a
> fairly useful resource of knowledge of things MOTM. What would
happen to it
> if the list were moved somewhere else?
> 
> --Adam