Loren, first I just want to say that I would be mortified if you took my negative reaction at the e-groups suggestion personally. I am all for the use of new technology, where appropriate, and if a good case can be made for the benefits of e-groups I'll welcome it. I just wanted to put the case for some of the elements we might loose, as well as gain. I'd hate to think people would be put off making suggestions of this sort because of anything I said. I'd hate you to think that I did not appreciate your efforts on behalf of this list.
Loren wrote:
>It *is* possible to have a digest-only group.
>However, it must be a newsletter assembled by the
moderator(s). Subscribers
>send their emails to the moderator (not the group)
and the moderator puts
>them together into a newsletter and sends it out on
his/her schedule.
While this would preserve the digest flavour, I would have guessed that this was more work than the majordomo option. Graham Robinson has volunteered to take up the mantle of running the digest, respect to you Graham, and as such I do believe that we have an alternative, at the present moment, to e-groups.
My problem is less a concern with copyright, or even the fact that email represents a good lowest-common denominator for internet access, but the fact that, as John Hughes reminded us, the medium affects the message. If we are going to use e-groups then the main reason would surely be to gain the web based newsgroup interface. Instant communication has benefits, but there are also drawbacks, in that the time to reply and remain relevant is shortened. I do worry that the quality of debate mght suffer. I certainly worry that the quality of my contributions might suffer - though some of you might not think they could get worse :-). I also worry about excluding those who cannot keep up with such a list (even though I could).
>Note that it's also possible to have both a
newsletter (Glorantha APA?) and
>a discussion list (Glorantha) as two separate lists.
I suspect I am on a different track to you but the question of whether a glorantha digest, could have a sister egroups list is an interesting one (if only as a place to upload files). If we maintained both then the postings on the egroups list could be summarised (weekly/fortnightly) and then posted to the regular digest subscribers. This of course needs the most number of volunteers, but could possibly prove an effective use of all resources. However my only question is what would be the difference in topic between such a list and the current Hero wars list. I would not be sure we could ask the Herowars list for such a relationship.
Ian
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