In article <1992Dec12.225210.3570 at gserv1.dl.ac.uk>, ajt at rri.sari.ac.uk (Tony Travis) writes:
>> I accept that bionet.plants is fairly active compared to some of the
> other bionet groups, but I don't regard less than ten messages per day
> to be a lot of mail.
Neither do I consider 10/day a lot, but most of PHOTOSYN would!
> At the risk of boring everyone to death, let me repeat that I have a
> full subscription to BIOSCI coming in here as mail and "procmail" puts
> it into folders for me that are periodically split into separate
> articles and posted locally as bionet.* news.
Unfortunately most subscribers wouldn't be able (or willing) to do this.
Also, many wouldn't have the local support to have someone work it out for
them.
> I don't see the logic of justifying the creation of bionet.photosyn on
> the basis of the low volume of traffic on the PHOTOSYN list? If you
> expect the majority of existing PHOTOSYN subscribers to subscribe to a
> BIOSCI version of their list (ie. not reading it as news) the only
> advantage I can see is that it brings PHOTOSYN to a wider (bionet)
> audience.
>Tony, the problem is not just volume, but also relevence.
Widening PHOTOSYN may indeed lead to >10 messages per day, but I hope that
these would be 10 messages of interest to the readership. On the other
hand, simply combining PHOTOSYN with another list would simply dilute the
traffic - in this latter case, even 3/day might be too much if most are
irrelevent.
> I suggested that Jonathan posted articles from PHOTOSYN to
> bionet.plants for precisely that reason, and he _has_ encouraged
> PHOTOSYN subscribers to use bionet.plants but I've not seen the epic
> debates about photosynthesis that I had hoped would evolve from this.
>> So, where does that leave PHOTOSYN as a news group?
PHOTOSYN surely provides a service, even without the epic debates! There
is a steady subscription which has now reached 280 (increasing some 20 per
cent yearly). There are several postings per week - nearly all are useful
to a large subgroup of readers. Most of my customers are perfectly happy
with the status quo, but that may be because they don't know better. I
would like to give them something better i.e. BIONET, but I need to do this
very gently (to avoid alienating people).
Also, at the present growth rate, we are headed for problems. I am well
aware of the defficiencies of LISTSERV and unwilling to spend an
ever-increasing amount of time maintaining PHOTOSYN in its present form
while there are better alternatives.
--
' Jonathan B. Marder
Internet: MARDER at AGRI.HUJI.AC.IL | Department of Agricultural Botany
Bitnet: MARDER at HUJIAGRI | /\/ The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Phone: (08 or +9728) 481918 |/ \ Faculty of Agriculture
Fax: (08 or +9728) 467763 / P.O.Box 12, Rehovot 76100, ISRAEL
