Stephen and others may be interested to know of the range of options for
keeping up with birding-aus. I also find the volume a bit much, nowadays, for
daily (especially worktime) reading. Unfortunately, the software that Deakin
uses means that we cannot receive the messages in digest form, so we have lots
of individual messages cluttering the inbox. Russell, any chance of an upgrade
in this area?
I filter birding-aus messages off to a folder and have a massive (half hour or
so) off-line read of them every few nights.
Another option is to read them on the web (yup, live, it costs) at Jack Siler's
site:
http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~siler/AUSB.html
or at Andrew Taylor's fine archive:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/birding-aus/
Yes, tradeoffs certainly exist between volume, quality and interest.
David
Stephen Mugford wrote:
> Shortly, I'll be sending an unsubscribe message to the system, but before I
> do I thought I'd say farewell and explain why I'm exiting soemting that has
> had valeu for me.
>
> I've enjoyed being on the chat line in general, and I've had a lot of
> pleasure reading some of the material, esp. trip reports.
>
> But, without re-opening too many of the old wounds about what the 'purpose'
> of birding-aus might be, I for one have found that the overall effect of
> the site has shifted to a mode where one gets swamped.
>
> I use email by logging in from my home/office to a server via phone modem
> -- quite a bit slower (even at 28800 bps) than (say) logging into a
> mainframe in a big organisation. A few of my messages are important and
> urgent and I need to be able to access them quickly.
>
> Typically now, I log in in the morning and I'm told I have 35-40 messages.
> it is not unusual for the vast bulk to be from the bird site. I download
> (tick, tick, tick) and then have to sift to see if there is anything
> important.
>
> Someone said recently that 'there is always the delete button'. Indeed. And
> for some while now I've been deleting w/o reading messages from some
> contributors who I consider twerps with an infantile sense of humour.
>
> Recently, I 've been deleting ALL the birding aus messages most days. This
> has been especially the case when, after a trip away for 48 hours, I return
> to find 100+ messages choking my system. This would worry me if I thought
> most were really useful. But I don't. When I get into SOME of the threads
> they are either very esoteric or else very trivial.
>
> I figure, if I'm not reading any, the site is no use, so I'm leaving. A
> pity. I'd still like to be involved if we had fewer, better quality
> messages (I'll especially miss Edwin Vella's trip reports) but the swamping
> is too much.
>
> Hope I'm in a minority.
>
> Au revoir
>
> Stephen Mugford
--
_______________________________________________________
David McDonald
PO Box 1355, Woden ACT 2606, Australia
Tel: +61 2 6231 8904 (h); +61 2 6249 5618 (w)
Fax: +61 2 6249 0740
E-mail:
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