[KLUG Members] RE: great site to "get together" in

[Adam Williams]

>>Hi!
>Hi!
Hi!

>>could post information there and check the different fields as opposed
>>to the mass e-mail that is current.  It would help with conserving some
>>bandwidth, and users would not be unindated with a lot of e-mail that
>You might be surprised how little bandwidth text takes compared to all the
>images of a php-nuke site.

Yes,  php-nuke takes EASILY 10x the bandwidth of an RFC822 SMTP
message.  Also SMTP has the advantage of being batched,  that is you see
the message once it has arrived,  you don't have to "wait" for it to
finish.  

>>needs deleting as it either doesn't pertain to information they need, or

Any e-mail client worth its salt can do this for you.  Also the
"community" aspect of a LUG means I *do* read the messages that don't
'pertain' to me, and offer assistance if I can.  The someone else reads
my message that doesn't 'pertain' to them, etc...  I think a forum site
actually makes this more difficult as you have to "find" the messages,
where as a mail client says "Here are the new ones".

>>want.  It's just a suggestion, but since this posting forum site is so
>>vacant, that KLUG member posting there would be almost in a domain of
>>their own anyway.  A little input from outside sources never hurts
>>anyway.
>I'm not sure what you mean by that last sentence. There shouldn't be any 
>"outside sources" here. Everyone is encouraged to sign up and
>participate.

I'm certainly not opposed to forums, but in my experience they only work
when the topic is very directed/specific AND they are closed to the
public.  The "effort" it takes to join a mailing list helps keep the
signal-to-noise ratio better.  Witness your average thread on Slashdot,
mostly rambling garbage,  people discussing the same thing under various
different posts, almost useless as a method of collecting information.

>>Like I said this is just a suggestion.  Apparently Bern, the moderator
>>there, has messaged me back stating that if the KLUG members would be
>>interested he would set a KLUG forums just for them.
>Well, thanks for the suggestion, but I think the mailing list serves our 
>needs here a little better. But, if we were going to make a switch, we
>would definitely want to run the site ourselves. 

Maybe a NNTP-to-SMTP gateway at some point in the future,  then you
wouldn't have to receive every message but could browse them with a news
reader. 

If the message count is annoying we do have a digest mode,  and the list
archives are browseable on the web site.


>That's one of the benefits of belonging to the group. We can decide to
>implement something like that and even if we have no experience with
>it we can all learn from doing it. 
>I would encourage everyone to volunteer to help in an area that interests 
>them, especially if they have no experience in that area. You can
>definitely learn by doing. I know I have.

Yes, and once you've learned something you can present on that topic to
KLUG. :)  Sort of a pay-back.