Re: Proposition: Upgrade APP to an Online Community

On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 11:58:00 -0600, "Gordon J. Holtslander"
<holtsg@duke.usask.ca> said:

> I recognize that a mailing list is not the ideal forum, but I think a web
> based forum is worse.

Agreed. One may see more postings per day on sites like APUG and
photo.net but they have much worse signal-to-noise ratio. One element I
think is essential to informational discussion that takes place on
alt-photo list is that the nonesense should be called nonesense before
it grows to "fact."
With too many amateurish "chemists" and "engineers" on such sites, and
many more jeerers and instigators, I'm not too hopeful in this aspect.

I prefer to see 1 part of information and 9 parts of crap, rather than 1
part of information and 199 parts of crap, lie, false dogmas, personal
attacks, jeering, instigations, plagiarism, and so forth that make up to
a larger number of posts. There are plenty of places for the latter.

> I would not run the list as a yahoo mailing list -

That's a bad idea. You might want to use AOL service before you do that
:-)

> I would only use a mailing list service that I have significant control over.
> I had considered moving the list to a hosting service where I could run the
> list
> manager of my choice, but this could not be done cheaply. The list has
> such a hight volume that it could not be done on an inexpensive shared
> hosting account. It would have to be done through a co-location service.
> These cost at least $150.00 per month. It would be necessary to add a
> lot
> of advertising or subscription fees. This would add a lot unwanted
> information, or limit the access to the list. I don't like either
> option.

I run a few mailing lists using Mailman running on a Linux based server.
I think the critical factor is not necessarily whether the server is
shared or co-location, but more to do with how well the server is
managed. But I don't see a problem with usask server...

> I would love to tie in some web based features - a wiki, a common image
> gallery. None of these can be supported over the long term cheaply. If
> there is a way of providing a more or less permanent location for these I
> would have no reservations over using them.

I had an experience of making community weblog, etc of that sort, with
the discussion in a mailing list of 150 subscribers. People say they
want it, and they say they'll contribute, but the reality is that the
participation level is low enough that it wasn't worth maintaining the
blog. If you make the system manual account creation only, and use good
comment spam blocking strategy, the maintenance cost may be close to
zero, though.

I currently use wiki as the CMS of the informational part of my website.
Several people said they would want to contribute on it, but from my
experience above, I remain skeptical until I see some new motivation to
do so.

Perhaps some people noticed that the photo gallery and wiki parts are
interconnected, and my wiki articles can refer to pictures in the
gallery without doing anything complicaed. This feature is unofficial
extension at this point, but I find it very easy to use and very useful
for the sort of things I'm doing.
Received on Wed Apr 26 12:45:03 2006