Moving The List
Chris Bensler set up a mailing list called EUforum
at topica.com and he invited me to check it out.
Over the past several days, I've tested all the features
and it looks very good. It has an archive with searching,
a Web interface for posting or viewing messages,
plus the usual immediate, or digested e-mail distribution
and posting. It has everything that this list has.
I'd like to move this Euphoria list over to topica.
It won't take any effort on anyone's part.
I just have to import the list of e-mail addresses from
this list into the topica list. You'll get a welcome
message from topica giving you an easy way to
opt out. If you do nothing (as I hope you will), you'll
be left in, but of course you can unsubscribe
at any time. A few subscribers to our current list have
concealed e-mail addresses. They will have to
subscribe to the new list by themselves.
Why do I want to do this?
1. John Kinne at Miami U. is the current list owner.
Most people assume that I'm the list owner, so I get
lots of requests to unsubscribe or change settings etc.
to which I have to compose a reply explaining what to do,
to which the person replies saying "it still doesn't work" etc. etc.
On topica I can unsubscribe someone, or change their
settings, with a couple of mouse clicks.
2. In the past year we've had several occasions
where someone is abusing the rest of us,
and there's little we can do other than
take a deep breath and hope he goes away.
We also had viruses posted, cracked software etc.
On topica I can suspend or remove someone with
a mouse click. If he comes back, I can click again.
I can immediately delete messages from the archive when they
contain viruses, trojans etc. before others are infected.
As Chris mentioned, it's a lot easier for me to get
rid of someone than it is for them to get a new
e-mail address and resubscribe.
If things get really bad, I can click the
topica list into moderation mode, where all posts
would go through me (or someone else) first.
3. This list has a lot of people, and there are a lot
of messages posted per day. If we choose to allow it,
Topica will give RDS a *lot* of free advertising in
exchange for 3-line text ads being inserted
in some of our messages. These ads do not appear
on the Web interface, only in e-mail messages.
A rough calculation shows that this advertising
would be 10x more significant to
RDS than the LinkExchange banner on our main
Web page. We can target our RDS ads to other
programming-related lists on topica. I think we'd
pick up a lot of new people. At any time, if the
ads were not achieving much, we could opt out
of the advertising system.
There's no rush, but I'm prepared to
move any time in the next few days. I can update
the list server page with the topica instructions.
If you want to view the "EUforum" Web interface it's at:
http://www.topica.com/lists/EUforum
If you want you can "Join the List" right away to test it,
or simply "Read the List". As I said, I can automatically
subscribe everyone.
If you want to post messages via the Web interface,
you'll have to register a name and password with topica.
Anything else can be done without registering.
Regards,
Rob Craig
Rapid Deployment Software
http://www.RapidEuphoria.com
|
Not Categorized, Please Help
|
|
