The era of the pure e-mailing list is almost gone! I am still on a lot of old-style mailing lists so know better than many. The only one that is going as strong as ever is something called RISKS [ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) - Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator]. This very excellent RISKS mailing list has been going since 1989 or 1990 and has its own very dedicated membership etc.
We have been on the go since mid-June 1992, which means we are in our 30th year of continuous operation. This is a hugely impressive thing in and of itself. I have almost everything that has been posted on the list during that time, and everything from January 1993, when I first joined myself. At least half the people on this list have been on it for over 25 years or more. We are not unlike RISKS in many ways but it's how we deal with it, will decide whether we continue as we are or not. The new WhatsApp group is great - which I'm trying to archive too - but it should never replace this mailing list. Saying all that, the mailing list is only as good as the people who contribute to it, which really is just two or three people on a consistent basis. Dave N. and Rich W. are keeping it fed almost single-handedly with their regular and consistently insightful & high-quality match reports. The more people who contribute to the list, the healthier it will be. I do see a few problems with the current Leedslist mailing list, one is the fact that it is text-based when time & tide have moved towards a more web-centric world (see below), another is the unknowing but very annoying habit of some posters to reply to (digest) posts including the entire contents of the (digest) posts they are replying to. There is little or nothing that the mailing list administrators [John Betty and myself] can do about that latter annoyance. It has turned a few people off the list but we don't want to go down the road of moderating all contributions etc. Remember, when the mailing list was first set up it was at a different-almost-pre-web time when many of us were not able to go to games, nor to look at them live on telly. The latter is pretty much no longer the case. There are many other e-forums for fans to contribute to than before too: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WACCOE-like forums, personal blogs etc. We live in an increasingly segmented world where we can consume our media in almost unique ways, this e-mailing list still being an almost-communal experience. We live in a much more "immediate" world than ever before too, which suits the WhatsApp model, while many of us are more reflective, which suits the e-mailing list model. However, for the list to survive, the quantity, but especially the quality, of the contributions must stay high, otherwise, we will continue to die very slowly. Who else is willing to man that gap of keeping the signal-to-noise ratio high? Let's be having ya, Kevin Lewis and your always-excellent musings, or anything else that comes into that weird and wonderful mind of yours, KofT! James. _______________________________________________ Leedslist mailing list Info and options: https://mailman.gn.apc.org/mailman/listinfo/leedslist To unsubscribe, email leedslist-unsubscr...@gn.apc.org Find us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/leedslist/ Rest in Peace Guy, and wear your hat!
