R-sig-phylo was once a place to discuss phylogenetics in R. It�s now a place to get ads from Physalia, PR Statistics, Transmitting Science, and Instats about courses and seminars they are offering (most paid, though not all). Some of the ads are relevant for using R in phylogenetics; many are not. But the listserv is now over 78% ads from these four organizations (more stats at https://brianomeara.info/posts/rsig/); only 4% of the most recent threads were about actual questions on using R for phylogenetics. It�s even worse in other listservs; in June, 2025, ALL 28 threads in the r-sig-ecology listserv were announcements of this sort (https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-ecology/2025-June/thread.html), so this is definitely a strategy these organizations have chosen to adopt.
There IS interest and value in a lot of the advertised courses, but it�s a different interest � in the same way R in finance could be important but only marginally overlaps with phylogenetics, so it would not be great if the vast majority of r-sig-phylo posts were about day trading. Perhaps it is time for these organizations to create an r-sig-courses or similar listserv, or use one of the many tools available for running a mailing list dedicated to potential customers of their organizations. We�re living in an era where a lot of online forums are potentially going to be full of AI-generated inauthentic comments; a working email forum could be valuable as a place for humans to talk to other humans, as this one has been in the past. That�s not going to be possible if people flee because it is now used as a marketing list. Hilmar Lapp, our very long-serving, volunteer, list moderator, posted something similar months ago ( https://www.mail-archive.com/r-sig-phylo@r-project.org/msg06067.html ) with some generous guidelines that allow some posting (most of the orgs have still posted in excess of this). Like him, I do see cases where a course posting could be relevant, so I�m reluctant to say we should ban all course announcements, but I think it could be worth having a rule like this at this point. Though maybe the organizations involved could try to listen to a plea from the community and choose to stop instead of putting yet more work on our mod. Thanks, Brian [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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