> this REFLECTOR thing - is about 10 years out of date, > and an antique.
> Take a look at the following link (if Elecraft's > REFLECTOR will let it thru) - and see how a 2007 > Message Board & forum looks and feels. Hmmm. Looks like the CompuServe forum I was using for customer support in 1989 -- almost 20 years ago -- and the Web-based forum I was using for customer support in 1995. List servers like this one grew up in about the same time period, reaching the Internet in the early 1990's. I have a strong personal preference for an email list. It is a "push" technology -- all the information comes to me instead of me having to go to the information -- and I can use a variety of easy-to-use tools to organize it. I can block posts from particular users, I can archive messages I may want to refer to in the future, and I can sort messages by date, subject, author or whatever. The Web-based archive at qth.net allows me to search the entire history of the list, and gives me the ability to download all messages over the entire history of the list to my local machine for storage or searching. Web-based forums require ME to visit THEM. In order to keep track of what I've seen before, some write a cookie to my machine. From time to time I flush my cookies and as a result, the Web forum may lose track of what I've seen and not seen, requiring me to manually review each thread. It is difficult to save posts for later review, except by cutting and pasting into a document of some kind, which loses the threaded nature of the discussion. My email program archives all the emails I send, so I have an easy record of everything I've posted to every email list of which I am a member. It is more difficult to get the same from a Web-based forum. But my purpose for posting was not so much to argue in favor of the email list over a Web forum (an argument I happen to know I'm going to win because I know where Eric stands on the issue) but rather to point out that email lists are no more "old fashioned" than forums. Their history overlaps. They were both developed at the same time. Rather than spit into the wind, the email list detractors should take five minutes to figure out how to better organize their incoming email. It's trivial to send all Elecraft email to its own folder in most email clients. It's trivial to further divide them by K1, K2, K3, etc. It's also trivial to switch to digest mode, or leave the list until such time as you need help. The solutions to the amount of traffic generated by this list are myriad and none require changes of the scope some have suggested, inconveniencing all 2000 members of the list. Craig NZ0R KX1 #1499 K1 #1966 K2/100 #4941 K3/100 < #200 _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
