Re: New home for list needed.
First, Gordon, I'm so sorry about what's happened to you, I gather without much advance warning if any. I can imagine how shocking and disorienting that must be, to have your floor suddenly pulled out from underneath you. Thanks so much for your years of quiet and competent management. As to what next, I have to agree with Paul and others who have expressed a lack of enthusiasm about yahoo. I am in a small mailing list on yahoo with my brothers and sisters (we were on a free service that was sold to yahoo, as I recall, and were transferred to yahoo as part of the assets of the previous service, in the same way that office furniture and personnel are transferred when one company buys another company. We had no say in the matter. So that's my first objection to yahoo or google, that they consider the content and the membership as assets to be bought and sold. Then there's the aggravations. For years, until I started using Firefox which filters out those ads, I had to endure a long wait every time I got a message from one of my siblings, while the ad that accompanied the message was downloaded, usually a before-after picture of someone who had lost weight. Fortunately Firefox is smart enough to filter out those ads so I never have to see them any more, but that's an issue for people who have dialup and don't have such a feature on their browser. And then there are the glitches. The yahoo software doesn't seem to adapt itself to a wide range of browsers, and we have several strangenesses that we have to deal with, just in our small group of eight. For example, for some reason I am unable to start a new thread. If I try to, it says I'm not subscribed and must subscribe in order to start a thread. But of course I'm subscribed, otherwise I wouldn't get the mail, but when I try to resubscribe so I can start a new thread, it tells me there's already a subscriber by my name. It's just this endless loop. So I've learned not to bother with that and I don't try to start new threads any more, I just reply to a previous thread and then change the subject line, and that works. And one of my brothers has the opposite problem; he can start a new thread but can't reply to an ongoing thread; if he tries to, we get the quoted previous message but not his comment. So if he wants to reply to a comment, he has to start a new thread and then copy over the comment he wants to reply to into the new thread. If there are two problems of this kind with a membership of only 8, I can only imagine the hassles and frustrations that could result from a membership in the hundreds. I understand the concern about having the whole responsibility fall on one individual, but that's essentially what we've had all these years. True, the list has been backed with the computer resources of the university, but the presence of the list on their servers was dependent on Gordon's management of the list. I'm not sure it's that different from Kees or Malin hosting the list, except that you don't have the computer services department of the university backing you up, you've just got that person and their server. But unless someone who is associated with a university is willing to approach their institution about hosting the list and is willing to personally undertake the management of the list, that's not an option that's open to us, and even were someone to step forward, it would probably take a while for the request to go through channels. My 2 cents for the moment, Katharine On Nov 10, 2009, at 7:42 PM, Paul Viapiano wrote: I, for one, am not crazy about Yahoo Groups. The interface is clunky and as sludgy as a gumoil brush left to dry for two weeks. I think the feel of the list is special "because" of its email-list- style and delivery...just sayin'.
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