In <1992Dec15.154209.1 at agri.huji.ac.il> marder at agri.huji.ac.il writes:
> 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.
I have been reading the PHOTOSYN debate for some time. Here are my thoughts
for what they are worth.
1)LISTSERV list-owners know more about the drawbacks of
LISTSERV than the regular user... Though they keep the horror
stories to themselves. (The politics of service)
2)With luck a user might be able to subscribe to a LISTSERV
but 90% of them do not know how to unsubscribe.
3)Getting logs of notebooks or doing LDBASE searches of LISTSERV
are completely UFO ideas to most biologists.
CONCLUSIONS: Joe Biologist wants mail and he does not care where it comes
from as long as it arrives and he can make a reply to it.
And if there is no bouncing mail so much the better.
OPTIONS: If you want to give your users a soft landing into the world
of BIONET, then why not proceed as follows:
1) Let Dave handle the administration of your list, but you
remain as chief-whip to keep things in order.
2) Begin with only the mail distribution, so that the transistion
will be gradual. REVIEW your list and send the stat file to
Dave with the E-mail addresses of your members
3) Do not impliment the bidirectional link to Usenet just yet...
which would circumvent the need to have a call for votes,
where you might run the risk of failure.
4) If the mailing list funtions well for a 6 month period,
and it passes the criteria which have been laid down for
the "continuation" of BIONET newsgroups, then it should
automatically become linked to Usenet.
That fourth option has never been discussed on Bionet, but I think that
if you establish a mailing list that is providing a steady turn over of
messages that have CONTENT, then it is a very simple matter to link the
mailing list to USENET.
Rob "draft beer... not resolutions" Harper
--
~ Rob Harper ~ E-mail: harper at convex.csc.fi
~ Finnish State Computer Centre ~ Molbio/software: harper at nic.funet.fi
~ P.O. Box 40 ~ Telephone: +358 0 457 2076
~ SF-02101 Espoo Finland ~ Fax: +358 0 457 2302
