At 10:15 PM 11/12/2009, Horace Heffner wrote:
In the event vortex-l goes down for an extended time, or gets shut
down by men in black, etc., I would like to suggest designating a
group on which messages can be exchanged to get status info and
regroup if necessary. I would like to suggest:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.fusion/topics?lnk=li
off which vortex-l essentially spawned. Messages could be posted
there with a [Vo] prefix.
At the very least, the moderator should make sure that he has a
complete list of subscribers, and keep that up to date. Often list
moderators have lists set to send them subscription and
unsubscription notices, so the complete list can be reconstructed
from those mails, assuming they are kept (which I always do for all
list business mail from lists I manage, as well as all list posts.)
If possible, independent copies of list archives should be kept.
Eskimo probably makes this easy; if not, there are scraper programs
that can assemble them. When smartgroups.com went under, there was
warning and another provider actually wrote a list archive capture
program and solicited list owners to use it. But most list owners,
not being connected with others, were mostly helpless. I made sure
that the assistance offer was posted on the moderator support forum,
while it lasted...
There is a mailing list that eskimo users just started, realizing how
difficult it was to get information about what was happening. Eskimo
staff, such as it is, was overwhelmed trying to fix the problems. The
users of a service should be organized, routinely, so that they can
assist each other and the service as well should an emergency arise.
Wait until the emergency arises, it's too late to organize.
The list is at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/EskimoNorthUsers/.
I'm going to subscribe, but I won't necessarily be checking the mail
from the list.
