On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Kevin LaTona <[email protected]> wrote: > As far as Google groups go. > > I believe that would force everyone to have to sign up again and or have a > google account to do so.
It would require everyone to sign up again. It would probably require them to have a Google account, although with Yahoo at least you could send an invitation to somebody and they could confirm, and thus get on the list without having a full Yahoo account. I'm not sure if Google does this, or if we could send a bulk invitation to all existing subscribers. > If so, that is going to be a lot of work don't you think? For the organizers, it's just a few screens to set up the lists. For members, it means subscribing. > Right now this list while public in nature is still private and limited to > it's members only. > > Or is it being crawled by Google, Yahoo or Bing, etc.. The archives are public. https://www.google.com/search?q=Sea+PIG+python+meeting+site%3Alists.seapig.org&hl=en&tbo=1&biw=621&bih=725&num=10&lr=&ft=i&cr=&safe=images The list of subscribers is admin-only. > The nice thing about this list is just works right now with very little > effort on anyone's part. > > Do we really what to change what has and is working just fine? There is little ongoing work, but as I said every time we install a new OS version we have to reconfigure it, and the people who used to do that are not around. > If we do change it will we loose or gain members? We would probably lose members as people don't resubscribe. On the other hand, some of those have probably stopped reading the messages anyway. There may be some promotional advantage to being on Google Groups, but I don't know what specifically that would be. The issue to me is that (1) searching in the archive would be more convenient. (2) Showing a message thread in one page as a "conversation" is nice, especially when it spans months. (The Mailman archive is by month.) > Do we really want search engines reading it? > > Do we gain or loose anything by doing this? It was a different era when the list was set up. I come from the early 1990s Internet where it was mostly researchers and students, and everybody used their real names and made most things public. Then came the AOL era where people used fake names and had multiple identities for their different personas and predators/bosses started doing bad things to people they met/saw online. The list was created in 2000, and because the founders were from the older Internet midset, and because it was an open-source topic (Python), we made everything public as much as possible. Now we're in a third era where social networks have become a more central part of everybody's lives. Whether that means we should stick to our original values or modify them, I don't know. But I would start with the principle that the list is an extension of the meetings, and everyone is invited to the meetings and can read the meeting notes. of course, going to a meeting takes a greater commitment than stumbling on a list archive via a search engine, so that's something there. > So far no one has ever hijack or spammed this list that I have ever seen. Spam messages go to a moderator bucket for approval, almost all of them because the sender is not subscribed. That's one thing that would be easier with Google Groups. On the other hand, there hasn't been a spam message for several months. -- Mike Orr <[email protected]>
