David, Although "hate" is a very strong word and I may not convince you otherwise, please permit me to defend the idea for a moment. I hope you'll see that it was done to help the list.
I believe you can agree that a single large community supporting a given product is better than several smaller communities. I think it's bad, for example, that ADSM has the adsm.org forums that are looked at by one group of people, the tek-tips.com forums that are looked at by another group of people, and the mailing list that's looked at by another group of people. The biggest problem is that newbies don't have any idea where to post their question. They post it to a forum that's got low traffic and they get frustrated. I therefore had NO INTEREST in building another community that was not connected to the existing one. I also believe that there are many people that can contribute to the discussion that do not want to consent to a barrage of emails every day. For example, many people send their email to the blackberries or treos, and don't want that kind of traffic. BUT, they wouldn't find following and contributing to postings on a forum. I started this with the NetBackup & NetWorker lists, and things have gone very well. In only a few months, we've got great synergy between the two. On any given day, I'd say about 5% of the postings on the list are coming from the forum, and most of them are actually ANSWERS, not "flyby" newbie questions that some were worried about. (One concern that some people stated was that they thought that newbies would jump in and out of a forum more often than they would a mailing list, that joining the list was considered "sweat equity.") Connecting it this way also provides a really great threaded search of the mailing list and all its history. (Check it out at http://www.backupcentral.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=13) After successfully doing this for the other products, I moved on to TSM. My questions to the list administrator went unanswered, so I went the "easier to ask forgiveness" route. As far as SPAM, which started this thread, I hate it as much as you do, and am vigilant against it. I'm actually continually working on minor and major updates to the site to let posters know that this is not what the site is for, and that we have a zero tolerance policy for SPAM. You may notice that I was quite quick on responding to this clown, the FIRST person, actually to use the forums to send SPAM to any of the three mailing lists I've done this for. The other list admins and I work together on this issue, and I hope that we can come to the same kind of arrangement here. I think the cross posting is good for all concerned, and I'd hate to see TSM listed as the only product that won't allow it. --- W. Curtis Preston Author of O'Reilly's Backup & Recovery and Using SANs and NAS VP Data Protection GlassHouse Technologies -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David 'Sniper' Rigaudiere Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 6:13 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Looking for a broker or buyer for Finisar SFP and Qlogic HBA > From: "soptotech" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Mon, May 14, 2007 11:14 > To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU I hate this idea where your forum is a proxy-in for ADSM-L. David Rigaudiere