Apologies for chiming in a little late here. I have to say I am (and have been for a while) in favor of moving the course announcements out of this mailing list into a channel of its own. The main reasons in my mind include the following:
- Having a separate channel for course announcements seems to be the common mechanism for distribution lists with a wide reach (case in point for our field is evoldir). This seems to work well – people interested in receiving these announcements opt in, everybody else doesn’t need to take (and validate, check, monitor etc) specific action. - Science has become and will continue to become more interdisciplinary, more so than ever in the age of data deluges and AI/ML. This can make it difficult to draw a good line between courses that are and those that aren’t pertinent to this community. And across this community, we’d probably choose different lines. - It’s a little hard to say right now whether the diminishing frequency of on-topic Q&A-style threads is a reaction to course announcements taking over more and more and arguably most of the traffic, or an independent trend reflecting something else. In the past, we have used frequency of posts as evidence supporting the list’s value and usefulness. I still consider this very valuable information to have – if this kind of forum is becoming or is much less useful than it was in the past, we should be able to see this from the list traffic, ideally unencumbered by confounding factors. Perhaps chatbots can now utilize the information from the list archives (which are public) well enough that most questions get answered this way rather than reaching the list as a post. -hilmar On Aug 21, 2025, at 11:14 AM, Oliver Hooker <[email protected]> wrote: That’s a really good idea Dave, a general list titled R-sig-courses. I’ll look in to the idea further and see how easy they are to set up and get back to you all. Best, Oliver Oliver Hooker PhD. PR stats On Thu, 21 Aug 2025 at 16:12, David Swofford <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Why not just create a new list "R-sig-phylo-courses" (or just "R-sig-courses"). By default, the new list would contain all current R-sig-phylo users, but it would be a simple opt-out for those who didn't want to receive the course announcements. Dave On Aug 21, 2025, at 9:13 AM, Oliver Hooker < [email protected]> wrote: Hi list members, Firstly, please accept my apologies for unintentionally misusing the list and for any inconvenience or annoyance this may have caused. This was never my intention, and I appreciate it being brought to my attention. Moving forward, I will ensure that I only post courses directly related to phylogenetics. The same applies to the genetics list. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for handling this matter so diplomatically. Thanks again, and best wishes, Oliver On Wed, 20 Aug 2025 at 07:06, Vojtěch Zeisek <[email protected]> wrote: Dear colleagues, I manually add Oliver Hooker <[email protected]> and < [email protected]> (send by Carlo Pecoraro) to the conversation. Especially Oliver, would You like please read full conversation < https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg06123.html<https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg06123.html>> and kindly *stop* sending advertisement which - as You can see - is not very welcomed anymore, if I may say so? The same applies for the [R-sig-genetics] mailing list as well. Otherwise I'd like to kindly ask list owners (CC) to consider some action. Yours sincerely, Vojtěch Dne středa 20. srpna 2025 3:16:10, středoevropský letní čas, Michael Zyphur napsal(a): Thanks again everyone for continuing this conversation. Instats is happy to participate on the list in any way that's best for the community. Just let us know what you think that is, and we're happy to contribute that way! Best wishes Michael Zyphur On Wed, 20 Aug 2025 at 02:21, Jacob Berv wrote: Seems like there should be a solution somewhere between total ban and extra work for mods. Is there a mechanism to contribute such adverts to some kind of once or twice a month digest? Maybe we can require all adverts to contain a clear tag in the subject (eg [ADVERT]) to aid easy filtering? Jake On Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 12:06 PM David Bapst wrote: Continuing this thread, I will note that since Liam's initial suggestion that advertisements be limited to phylogenetics, Oliver Hooker has posted three announcements unrelated to phylogenetics. Cheers, -Dave B -- Vojtěch Zeisek https://trapa.cz/en/<https://trapa.cz/en/> Department of Botany, Faculty of Science Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic https://botany.natur.cuni.cz/<https://botany.natur.cuni.cz/> Institute of Botany, Czech Academy of Sciences Průhonice, Czech Republic https://www.ibot.cas.cz/en/<https://www.ibot.cas.cz/en/> Computing cluster https://sorbus.ibot.cas.cz/en/start<https://sorbus.ibot.cas.cz/en/start> -- Oliver Hooker PhD. PR stats [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-sig-phylo mailing list - [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-phylo<https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-phylo> Searchable archive at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/<http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-sig-phylo mailing list - [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-phylo<https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-phylo> Searchable archive at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/<http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/> -- Hilmar Lapp -:- genome.duke.edu -:- lappland.io [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-sig-phylo mailing list - [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-phylo Searchable archive at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
