Hi folks (those of you still left!)
I've been lurking for the last couple of weeks, trying to decide what to
do about Birding-Aus. Here are some ideas:
PLEASE RESOND DIRECTLY TO ME UNLESS YOU HAVE SOMETHING SIGNIFICANT TO SAY
TO THE WHOLE BIRDING-AUS COMMUNITY. I WILL POST A SUMMARY OF RESPONSES IN
A FEW WEEKS. ***PLEASE*** TRY TO AVOID 120 LIST MESSAGES A DAY ABOUT WHAT
TO DO WITH BIRDING-AUS!!
1. Split the List
1a. Keep Birding-aus for general chat, hobbyist sort of stuff, plus rarity
info. Then we'd lose the serious ornithological musings, bird behaviour
notes, and conservation pleas for help.
1b. Keep birding-aus for serious stuff only, and start a new group called
Birding-Aus-Chat. It would be hard to enforce the distinction, and a lot
of serious stuff makes me laugh a lot anyway. We have some very clever
writers on birding-aus.
Have several lists:
Birding-aus-rarities
Birding-aus-chat
Birding-aus-conservation
Birding-aus-behaviour
Birding-aus-research
AAAAGHH! I try to do that with all the messages I keep and I've ended up
with such a mess of duplicates of messages that fit 2 or more
criteria.....
OK so splitting the list is never going to be easy....
2. Moderate the list.
Who? Me? That would be interesting for the first day, tedious for the
second, and from then on only half your messages would go to the list, all
of them 3 weeks late. Very handy for letting everyone know about a
Temminck's Stint in the Deakin Library carpark - um - last month....
3. Create a newsgroup.
This may be the best option. Will someone tell me how to do it? I used
to have a bit of an idea (I know all about the polling and announcements,
etc, but I missed out on the bit about actually CREATING a new newsgroup.
Don't panic - Birding-aus would still be there for those without newsgroup
access. But we would try to make it about Australian wild birds. Only
about Australian wild birds. The chat would be encouraged to go to the
newsgroup.
PERHAPS we should create a couple of newsgroups:
Aus.birding.chat
Aus.birding.behaviour
Aus.birds.rare
What do you think?
4. Leave things as they are.
I hope this will work. At the moment the university is radically changing
all of its internet services, including charging departments for external
WWW and telnet access, for example. So far email has been safe, as have
the 50 or so mailing lists run from the university servers. But I have
been thinking about other options should we lose this privilege.
Well, there you have my 2c worth. I will be away for a couple of weeks
from 12th April so nothing much (hopefully) will happen for a while. I'm
happy to start the ball rolling for a newsgroup if that's what people
want. Thank you all for making birding-aus such a great community,
despite the occasional irritations and squabbles. I would miss it
terribly if it wasn't there - or rather, it is you I would miss!
Anyway, I'm the one who groans about long messages, so enough from me.
Please send me your ideas, which I will summarise for the list. That's
after I bump up my yearlist if I get any time off in Singapore and Kuching
over the next 2 weeks :-)
Cheers
Russell Woodford
List Maintainer (a.k.a. the one you complain to)
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