Message text written by Bill Thoen
>A newsgroup is a wide open open mailing list, with the main
difference being that all the mail resides on a server near you.
[...] . You have to connect to an NNTP server
(ask your ISP for the address of their news server) and you have
access to literally zillions of email based discussion groups.
The big GIS one is comp.infosystems.gis<
Thanks for the GIS newsgroup address -- I didn't know about that one. I've
been a fan of newsgroups for years (about 10?). I don't think access to
newsgroups will be a problem, except maybe for those with corporate
firewalls. If you have internet access, I think you have newsgroup access.
I don't remember the website, but there is at least one that functions as
a newsgroup reader. Many ISPs also provide a reader, although some (like
CompuServe in my case) is pretty hard to use.
The biggest advantage I see for a newsgroup is that it is "out there,"
waiting for you to come to it. If you leave town for a week and don't
check/delete your e-mails, you won't return to find several hundred "MI..."
messages waiting. They'll still be available, but at your convenience. If
you read from several newsgroups, the messages from all of them patiently
wait there for you to do read them. If you only have a passing interest in
a topic, you can check in once a week (or whenever), scroll through the
message titles and read the one or two that catch your interest. After
some period of time (30 days?) the server dumps the messages, so at any
point you wil only have access to the most recent (30 days?) worth of
messages. Copies of older posting from many (all?) of the newsgroups are
available at www.deja.com -- just search by keyword.
The obvious disadvantage, as has already been stated, is that the
newsgroups are completely public. This means we would see some amount of
spam, pornographic ads, and other non-desirable off-topic posting.
However, I don't think it would be a large amount for this proposed
newsgroup. Some of the more technical newsgroups I frequently read have
very little of this type of traffic. In general, the more technical and
less juevenile the topic of the newsgroup, the less trash.
However, off-topic trash is not our biggest worry. The biggest risk we
face, in my opinion, is in losing the helpful and friendly character of the
list. For some reason, newsgroups tend to me more impersonal. For
example, it surprised me when Bill mentioned that the list had over 1000
subscribers. The posting mechanism we have in place now (post problem to
list, direct-reply to original poster, post summary to list) is quite nice
and would be difficult to implement in a newsgroup. The way newsgroups
work, they lend themselves to continuing discussions where each poster adds
a line or two and then posts for everyone to see. At least that's the
character of most of the newsgroups I've been part of over the past decade.
I'd hate to see the character of our list devolve to that of a typical
newsgroup.
When Bill originally asked the question, I was a solid "yes" vote. The
more I think/write about it, however, the more I become a solid "undecided"
vote.
Good luck,
Steve Riese
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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