Admin: Now closed to new members, scaling back my participation

[Merlin Mann]

Membership in the 43F Google Group is now closed to new people.

We have about 4,500 lively and intelligent folks here, so I think you
won't want for friends or conversational biodiversity. As I'd said a
while back, I'm encouraging people interested in the peculiarly 43
Folders-esque conversations to move over to our official board
(http://board.43folders.com/), but I'm more than happy to keep this
group up and running for y'all -- as long as I can scale my
administrative participation way way back (eventually probably handing
off to someone else completely). The Google group will be something I
continue to visit and enjoy when I have the time, but my attention is
definitely needed more over on the board I'm trying to shepherd on the
Mothership. It's not like I've been contributing much in front of the
curtain here, so I doubt you'll miss me. :)

Anyhow, this should change zero about this group apart from cutting way
down on the spam so, thanks, have fun, and holler if anything breaks.

yr absent parent,
/m

[Ben Wilson]

The one thing I like about groups such as this is the ability to go to
one place and few trends in conversation of several different sites. By
moving on to the site-specific bulliten board, don't I lose that?

Ben

[wolf2k5]

I also think the mailing list is easier and faster to read than a
forum, especially if you use a Gmail account for it.

Regards.

[Doug H]

The "abridged" summary that Google groups is a wonderful advancement in
mailing list usability. If you subscribe by digest (or have on other
mailing lists), try the "abridged" version. Rather than having to wade
through the full text of every new message, it shows which discussions
have been updated along with links to the 43Folders archives on
groups.google.com. It's rather convenient to just click through to
those discussions that interest me.

And I agree that the list is more convenient than remembering to visit
a bboard.

[Merlin Mann]

Guys, like I said, this isn't going away; I just don't have the time to
actively follow the volume here as I try to grow the other board. I
meant no pressure to dissuade you into choosing one over the other (or
to imply that I'm killing this off).

I'm super-glad folks are still digging the Google Group, and I'm happy
to keep it alive as long as people find it useful. This wasn't intended
as a buzzkill, just as a way to pseudo-officially announce a) that it's
closed to new people for now and b) I'm scaling back my own
participation in the interest of not "chasing two rabbits."

[Daniel Walker]

Also, to put my two cents in - the message board is fairly easy to keep up with via the RSS feed.  It's not annoying me as much as I thought it would.  :)

-Daniel

[S. William Schulz]

On 2/6/06, Daniel Walker <dan.sk...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Also, to put my two cents in - the message board is fairly easy to keep up
> with via the RSS feed. It's not annoying me as much as I thought it would.

Which RSS feed are you using to give you a threaded view of all posts?

S

[beelers]

Ditto that. Email comes to Mail.app and is filtered for reading. With
the forum, I have to go find all the stuff I want to follow or find
the stuff I want to choose to follow by e-mail.

That's why I like the Google group (or any newsgroups for that matter).

[beelers]

I prefer following each individual message, using threading in
Mail.app or my newsreader to ease following conversations (to use a
Google term).

[GTD Wannabe]

I'm probably going crazy, but I don't see the same things with the
feeds as I do on the board. I just checked the board, and there wasn't
much new there, but I did read a couple of new posts on older threads.
Then, I used Onfolio to capture the feed (from the main board page) and
got http://feeds.feedburner.com/43FoldersBoard But when I look at the
last 15 posts (which is what my Onfolio does when it gets a new feed),
they're all new posts, no followups to old posts. What's more
interesting, is that they are posts I didn't see when I was over at the
board. It's like two different places.

Can anyone explain how this feed is supposed to work? I've been using
feeds for a while, but am no expert. My old feed was based on the
Google Group, and it was great - got the first few lines of each post,
new and old. Now, I can just see the first line or two - not enough
info - and I'm not even convinced I'm getting all the content. Sigh.

[Chris Lott]

On 2/6/06, Merlin Mann <merli...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I
> meant no pressure to dissuade you into choosing one over the other (or
> to imply that I'm killing this off).

FYI: it's hard not to equate closing subscriptions with killing the
group off, but slowly... I posted my thoughts on the board:
http://board.43folders.com/showpost.php?p=1185&postcount=42

Anyway, you've mentioned potentially passing other admin duties off to
someone else, perhaps handling subscriptions could also be passed off
and enrollments could be re-opened?

c

[Daniel Walker]

Hmm.  I'm not sure about inconsistencies b/t the board and the feed - Merlin might speak to that, I think he recently posted about some feed weirdness that's been going on recently.

Yes, the feed only shows the original post of new threads, which is less than ideal.  However, as I said, it doesn't bug me as much as I thought it would.  Here's how I use it:

(Note: I use SharpReader to monitor all my RSS.)

1. Check the feed, see if there are any new threads on topics that interest me.  I can usually tell whether a thread is going to hold anything I care to read or not by the original post.

2. For any post that looks like it might bring an interesting discussion, I click on the header.  This opens the thread, pre-scrolled to the first post, and I can read the follow-up posts (if any).

3. If there's a thread I want to watch for future discussion, I flag it (right-click the item).  I sort by flag, so any flagged posts will stay at the top.  Once the thread's dead, I remove the flag.

It would be nice if there was a way to publish the entire contents of the thread into the body of the RSS item (sorry if I'm not using the right terms here), so new replies to a post would show up in the item itself and cause the item to show as having been updated - but this is good enough for me.

And no, it's not as elegant as google groups feeding into a gmail account or threaded discussion mode in your favorite email client, nor is the flat discussion structure in forums as elegant as a threaded model for long, rambling threads.  I would rather we stuck with the Google Group, personally.  However, it's Merlin's baby, the GGroup still seems alive and well, and as I said, I don't mind keeping up with the forum as much as I thought I would.

-Daniel

[Vicki Brown]

At 15:45 -0900 02/06/2006, Chris Lott wrote:
> FYI: it's hard not to equate closing subscriptions with killing the
> group off, but slowly... I posted my thoughts on the board:
> http://board.43folders.com/showpost.php?p=1185&postcount=42
>
> Anyway, you've mentioned potentially passing other admin duties off to
> someone else, perhaps handling subscriptions could also be passed off
> and enrollments could be re-opened?

I have replied to Chris' post with my own thoughts (hint: they agree) and
have volunteered to take on admin duties (preferably in combination with
several other like minded folks) in order to allow us to reopen the list to
new members.

My recommendation is to moderate membership (I do that on all of "my" lists;
it seems to cut down on "subscription for the sake of sending spam")
--
- Vicki

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