First, I invited everybody to take a poll on eGroups without realizing that you need to join the Glorantha group in order to take the poll. I just want to let everybody know that you are still invited to take the poll once, twice, or as often as you like, and my intention is to continue on with the mailing list if that's what Issaries wants to do, and to delete the mailing list if they want to go that way. In the meantime, the Glorantha mailing list on egroups.com is open for subscription, but disabled. It will forward no emails. And it won't forward emails unless and until it becomes the official mailing list.
Second, Yahoo and Egroups are merging. Egroups copyright policy has always said that they do not own the copyright of any group postings, but that postings to the service are the property of their individual copyright holders. They do, however, keep a worldwide non-exclusive royalty-free license to reproduce group postings so they can be read by other members of the groups. I've read the Yahoo policies, and Yahoo is keeping the Egroups copyright policies.
Third, I don't think the format of the glorantha digest is what ensures its character. I think it's the posters to the digest, with all their knowledge, inventiveness and foibles. I used to think the format ensured its character, back when I took over list-owner status from Henk, and that's why it was a digest-only list then, but I no longer think so. Nowadays, I tend to agree with Alex Ferguson, that a digest of messages makes it harder to find the content you want amid a plethora of topics, and obviously it makes it much harder to use threaded mail reading software or to keep consistent subject lines across a discussion.
Fourth, majordomo supports email delivery of archives while eGroups supports web browsing of archives. Neither one supports the downloading of masses of archives to be read at leisure. That functionality has been supported in the past with other software. I see no reason why we couldn't mirror or otherwise reproduce a set of archives at another site.
Fifth, the glorantha digest has had a few spam attacks, but not a lot, over the years, but there is nothing other than a highly involved list owner to stop spam or punish spammers. Egroups has automated anti-spam measures already in place.
Sixth, I've run the glorantha digest as a majordomo list for four years. I'm the only person other than Eric Rowe who has. I'm a reasonably competent sysadmin and perl hacker. And it took no less than 10 hours a week to run through all the list owner messages, bounces, make sure that unsubs and mis-addressed email went through, and so on. On the average, there were over 100 administrative messages a day. Egroups mailing lists are much less time intensive. Bouncing email addresses are visible on a webpage, can be unsubbed with the click of a checkbox, and do not dump huge amounts of trash email into the inbox.
Seventh, eGroups has a searchable, threaded, web-based interface. And it is on a fast server that is almost always up. That's unbelievably cool from a web-designer point-of-view.
Eighth, Egroups allows us to create databases, ask and score polls, upload and download files, automate delivery of FAQL and other files, link to other websites, and keep these things all in one place.
Ninth, eGroups includes a short advertisement at the top of every message if you get the individual messages, or at the top of every digest if you get the digests. That's irritating sometimes.
Tenth, Egroups will allow us to have multiple moderators of the group, and for the group to continue without needing to be moved to another server if and when the current owner and moderator(s) can no longer afford the time taken on the list.
Eleventh, we might need to recreate the mailing list if eGroups went out of business or changed its business plan. I don't see that as any more of an issue than what we've done already, a few times, when Andrew Bell handed the list to Henk Langeveld, when Henk handed it to me, or when I handed it to Eric Rowe.
Twelfth, it might confuse some people to see HeroWars, HeroWars-Rules, and Glorantha on the same server. But it might also confuse them to see Glorantha-Espanol on the same server. And it might confuse them if Glorantha was on chaosium.com, while the website was at glorantha.com, and the Hero Wars lists were on egroups.com. Why so many sites? Isn't multiple sites more confusing than single sites? In fact, I think those who have brought this up as a problem have it exactly wrong. Multiple sites are more confusing than single sites. Having a unified interface for the three mailing lists simplifies things rather than complicates.
All in all, my opinion is that the positives greatly outweigh the negatives. If Issaries should agree, then I think Egroups would be an excellent server and system for running the Glorantha mailing list.
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