J. Forster wrote:
If your objective is to make a Wiki for Time-Nuts topics, why not do just
that. There are Wiki Builder packages out there and IMO an easily
searchable archive of Group posts would be "a good thing".
It's unclear to me how many will have time to read both emails and a
forum. I certainly don't.
It would be a "benefit to society" if someone were to take all the posts
on various schemes and circuits and edit them into a document/wiki/FAQ..
however, having done that in other circumstances, I know that it is a
HUGE task, and one that is continuing.
I've been involved in several mailing lists over the years (and years)
and some (like this) have a fairly high signal to noise ratio. ALL of
them occasionally have noise bursts (for lack of a better term).. often
when the list traffic is otherwise slow and/or people are busy doing
something they're not yet ready to talk about or need to have questions
answered. to paraphrase mailing lists abhor a vacuum, and rather than
"is the list still alive" posts, technically oriented lists wind up with
a certain amount of topic drift, but it's temporary, and as soon as some
thing interesting in the real core area pops up, it snaps back into line
(often aided by the skilled hand of a moderator)
I am aware of one successful "fork" and that's from the Tesla Coil
Mailing List (TCML) at http://www.pupman.com, which spawned a 4hv forum,
because the TCML tries to stay Tesla coil focused, but there is a lot of
interest in non Tesla Coil HV stuff. A lot of overlap between members,
and both are active, and both are also high SNR.
Sometimes, too, there are personality clashes or people get cranked up
about some issue, but those inevitably die down (or the gentle hand of
moderation puts out the flames) because, under it all, the people on the
list are there because the care about the subject, and caring about the
subject means strong feelings, but also (eventual)tolerance of others
(again, moderators can do wonders)..
I am aware of several unsuccessful forks (or of limited success,
anyway)... where there was an attempt to split out the "newbie
questions" from the "old hands"... the problem is that the old hands
want to talk old hand stuff, but are also the folks best suited to
answering the newbie questions, so the reading/responding traffic hasn't
really changed. And how do you get to be an old hand without starting
as a newbie? There are also manufacturer sponsored lists where
marketing or product support is important, and there's a desire to keep
the speculative bug finding and philosophical design discussions from
distracting new customers. Flex-radio/flexedge lists are in this bucket,
but I don't know how well it works. There's lots of other factors at
play in that particular list/forum arena. (And, of course, the biggies
like Apple, Dell, HP, etc, are notorious for removing posts that are
uncomfortable)
Personally, I like email lists, because I am an old codger at the age of
50 and prefer a gentle "push" rather than having to "pull" from a forum.
It's like reading the morning newspaper (which I did just before
writing this!) The only time it's a pain is when I'm on travel for an
extended period of time, because it's worse going through hundreds of
emails (from all sources) at a crack than seeing them all nicely laid
out. I could, I suppose, set up some rules/folders, but that leads to
"folders of unread list posts", and I'd rather read/delete/read/delete
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