Thanks, Barry, for your good advice. In fact, our best approach might be to
do just as you say: help subscribers learn how to set digests, filter their
email, and search their own archives.
To figure out how to solve the problem, we'd like to find out from the ebase
support community how it wants to organize itself--and we'll do our best to
make it happen.
1. Are there communities of interest that you'd like to belong to, as
opposed to the one large community we have right now? When we had two lists
(newbies and support) we found that there was little distinction in the type
of questions posted to each. They really didn't function as distinct
communities of interest.
2. What do you think of using an web-based forum (such as one Ted Fickes
just suggested outside the listserv, www.phorum.org)? Web-conferencing is
organized by topic and is searchable. But you would have to get on a website
every time you have a question (though you can set it to email to you the
posts to a given thread of discussion).
3. Other ideas and preferences?
The ebase team will be discussing different solutions next Tuesday, and we
would like to be guided by what you all want. So please let us know!
Liz
----------------
Liz Gans
Director, ebase Community Support
TechRocks
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
----------------
-----Original Message-----
From: Ashton Computing & Mgt Svcs [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2001 8:40 AM
To: TechRocks Support
Subject: [support] Overwhelming Support List
A number of folks appear to be bailing from this list in sheer despair at
the volume of mail that's been coming through. I've seen this happen on a
number of lists over some years on the internet. There are better ways of
handling it.
The way I like is to have lots of disk space, and just let the support mail
pile up in a folder of its own. Occasionally I'll read it all for a few
days, to get a feeling for what sorts of problems people are running into,
but then I get overwhelmed and just let it slide.
That being said, when I have a problem, the first thing I do is a text
search through the Support mailbox. Frequently, I remember seeing
something like my problem show up before, and just have to find the
discussion.
Another way is to go to the web site listed at the bottom of every Support
email, and set your preference to "no mail." You remain affiliated, but
stop getting mail. You can post and view mail through the web site and
keep it all off of your home machine. Currently there is an archive there
back to 12/31/2000--I don't know if there's a 3-month cutoff or if that's
just a starting point.
Barry Newton
Greater Sandy Spring Green Space
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