So the question is: Why does Dave use this slow hosting company
to run the Flashcoders mailing list when there are better and cheaper
(free)
alternatives available?
Good question!
But first, I should correct a minor misperception. It's not a matter
of a slow hosting company, or a slow server - the current server is
fast enough to handle the load it gets, and there's plenty of
bandwidth at the ISP. I subscribe to groups on both Google and Yahoo,
and generally see my posts just as quickly from chattyfig as with
those groups. Obviously, your mileage may vary, but there you go.
That said, if it were entirely up to me, I would have switched to
Google Groups. I'm a big fan of Google services in general - Fig Leaf
is a Google Enterprise partner, we use Google Apps for email,
calendaring and information sharing, etc, etc.
However, we run a number of lists, not just Flashcoders. There are
about a dozen different lists. Some of those lists have some actual
business value for us, as a channel for our expertise and for
advertising our services. Flashcoders really doesn't at this point, if
it ever really did at all. When these lists were set up long ago, they
were set up using mailman. Mailman stores user lists and other data in
a non-text format: Python qpickle files. When the Flashcoders list
broke, I had absolutely no familiarity with this, and so had no way to
export users from Mailman to Google Groups. I did, on the other hand,
have a shiny new server that wasn't doing anything else, so the path
of least resistance was to set up Mailman and just move everything
over.
Out of all those lists, Flashcoders was the only one with which I had
any problems. Because Flashcoders' files were corrupted, and I didn't
know Python, I had to manually extract information from the qpickle
files. The other lists ran fine the whole time, and I could migrate
them without any trouble. But I sure did run into trouble migrating
Flashcoders for a variety of reasons, and got a bunch of flak from
subscribers who didn't know how to unsubscribe, etc.
So, in conclusion, if I woke up tomorrow and this was on Google
Groups, I'd be perfectly happy. But that would require current
subscribers to subscribe to that on their own. I just went ahead and
created a group:
http://groups.google.com/group/flashcoders-group
If the consensus is that we should move over there, I'm willing to go
ahead and do that. But I'm a little reluctant to migrate the
Flashcoders user list directly over there on my own volition, because
of the negative feedback I got last time I had problems with the user
list.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information!
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