Groups

[Richard Owen]

I've been on the list since almost the beginning, which coincided with when I first started playing. It has been a fabulous experience and I would like it to continue.

I know this has been discussed before, but it would be very helpful to get a recap of the pros and cons of using Google or Yahoo groups. I moderate a number of groups, some passively, spme actively. It seems as if a solution like this could provide some continuity with minimal effort without resorting to a forum model.

If the list remains hosted in its current form, I would be happy to help with funding.

[first last]

We currently do have both a yahoo and a google group mirror of the
regular list. You can easily post to the harp-l group from the google
group, yahoo is more trouble but it can be done. I'm no fan of either
group, y or g. What they both have going for them is they are free
but it's also what's bad about them, they're free, It's a lot easier
to admin a Mailman list and your control is a lot more granular than
it is on y or g. Google and Yahoo can both be incredibly frustrating
because stuff just breaks and you have no way of fixing it or asking
for help. You just wait nd one day they fix it but they never tell
you they did it just happens by magic.

Funding, working on that one right now. I will keep you apprised of
my efforts and results.


Why I've never wanted to use Yahoo or Google as my primary list is you
are surrendering your content and you get ads. I'm offended by the
ads and I'm protective of my content. You also can lose your
archives. Yahoo only compiles a certain amount of archive and then it
just overwrites the oldest stuff. The google archive starts later and
has holes in it because google was rejecting the list mail semi
intermittently for a bit plus I've edited both the google and the
yahoo archives because it's a lot easier to do. I take that back it's
easier to delete a post. Editing cannot be done on Yahoo or Google.

Harp-l is an e-mail list. That's why it's called harp-l. l-soft as
in list serv lists were called "name"-l. If you were to migrate this
list to a forum it wouldn't be harp-l it would be something else. I've
watched two long time Mailman lists migrate to the google platform.
It pretty much cut their traffic in half, split the archives and cost
both lists more than half of their membership. It's not something to
do lightly.

The downside of Mailman is no attachments, pictures embedded youtube
videos etc. You can actually do it but it's a lot harder to admin and
requires a whole lot more memory than we're paying for currently. For
instance we do not run spam assassin on harp-l because we couldn't
afford the memory hit. Turns out that it works fine and caused us to
rethink some settings and policies plus it keeps us from allowing
html posting which keeps the bandwidth down and makes us pretty much
trojan and virus proof. Malicious links can still make it through but
that's about it.

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "harp-l-meta discussions" group.
> To post to this group, send email to harp-l-meta...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to harp-l-meta-discu...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/harp-l-meta-discussions?hl=en.
>

[El Rey de los Super Mochomos]

Here's something else to consider, harp-l is very very green as lists
go. We have this idea that the internet is free but the reality is
anything but. Server farms are locating adjacent to hydro-electric
power to keep their costs down. One of the biggest issues for server
farms is cooling. They generate a lot of heat. All of this is
directly related to the amount of data that is being transmitted. Our
data footprint is conservatively small because we're cheap. All those
embedded youtube videos, they cost bits and bytes. HTML e-mails are
more than triple the size of plain text. Meta on a topical list is
just noise and it costs to transmit. Our server is a VPS, virtual
private server. We're sharing space with other users. No ads, less
data, less energy. My first computer was a Commodore VIC20.
Constraint is good for the soul.