I need an e-mail fix change.

Guys, this is not an email list, this is a bulletin board. It is what it is. "dear cow, please stop giving me milk and give me eggs instead" - yes, I'm being flippent - I mean no insult, but it illustrates my point, the boards are just that, boards. There are people who provide mailing lists and there are people who provide bulletin boards, just like there are cows and chickens, each provide something usefull and different people preffer different things. There is no point in giving off to a cow because it does not give you eggs and likewise there is no point in complaining on a BB system because it does not behave like a list server!

You can subsribe to threads that you like and get an email each time a reply is posted since your last visit to the thread (i.e. you get one notification the first time a new reply is made but no more till you've re-visited the thread - keeps the site from slowing to a crawl - more on this later). And, as the guys pointed out, RSS feeds are available too as yet another way to keep up to date with the comings and goings here.

The volume of traffic on this board is massive, each month we get through over 10GB of it! It is simply not possible to pump that volume of traffic over email without totally swamping people's mailboxes and I'd hate to see what would happen to our bandwidth usage if we started to email everything too.

In fact, these bulletin boards do more to help people keep up to date than most, the "New Topic" notifications are a custom addon to the boards software that I coded up myself, regular bulletin boards do not have this functionality (BTW, if people are interested in adding New Topic Notifications to Bulletinboards they run the code is available here: www.minds.nuim.ie/~voyager/downloads.php ). However, start a thread and you'll see that it causes problems. There is about a 30 to 60 second gap when you click "post" when starting a new thread where the site appears to hang because it is frantically emailing out the new topic notifications. This is bearable on new threads (JUST) but it would be utterly un-acceptable to have that delay on all regular posts too which is what would happen if I edited the forum software to email everything out.

As I see it, there are thousands of astronomy mailing lists out there, if you really need a list and are not happy with a bulletin board then join a list and don't bother with the bulletin board - different horses for different courses and all that. We all have our own preferences and needs and the great thing about the internet is that you can find just about anything!

Clear skies,

Bart B.,
IFAS Webmaster.

Guys, this is not an email list, this is a bulletin board. It is what it is. "dear cow, please stop giving me milk and give me eggs instead" - yes, I'm being flippent - I mean no insult, but it illustrates my point, the boards are just that, boards. There are people who provide mailing lists and there are people who provide bulletin boards, just like there are cows and chickens, each provide something usefull and different people preffer different things. There is no point in giving off to a cow because it does not give you eggs and likewise there is no point in complaining on a BB system because it does not behave like a list server!

www.opensolaris.org/jive/forum.jspa?forumID=13 for example is a bulletin board. It also functions equally well as a mailing list. There are cows that lay eggs too I guess. That's set up that way specifically be cause some people wanted mailing lists and others a BB.

I'd rather see a focus on what best allows people to participate rather than what the limits of some software should be.

Cheers,
~Al

a big problem folks is that a lot of people are not posting into the right sections of the forum. Nearly everything is getting lumped into "General". Therefore, will people please THINK about what they are posting and what category it should fall under.

John

Guys, this is not an email list, this is a bulletin board. It is what it is. "dear cow, please stop giving me milk and give me eggs instead" - yes, I'm being flippent - I mean no insult, but it illustrates my point, the boards are just that, boards. There are people who provide mailing lists and there are people who provide bulletin boards, just like there are cows and chickens, each provide something usefull and different people preffer different things. There is no point in giving off to a cow because it does not give you eggs and likewise there is no point in complaining on a BB system because it does not behave like a list server!

www.opensolaris.org/jive/forum.jspa?forumID=13 for example is a bulletin board. It also functions equally well as a mailing list. There are cows that lay eggs too I guess. That's set up that way specifically be cause some people wanted mailing lists and others a BB.

I'd rather see a focus on what best allows people to participate rather than what the limits of some software should be.

Cheers,
~Al

They appear to have a much lower volume of posts per day than we do. In our case we easily hit 50 or so a day if not more. That is a large volume of email to be dumping on anyone and also yet another avenue for us to hemmorage bandwidth.

The other issue that we have is that you cannot reply by email because it is not an email list so having every posts get emailed will result in a massive amount of "stray posts" in my inbox with as people actually start to treat this as a list server. The newtopic notifications already cause this problem to the point that I've moved to boards "from" address from webmaster@irishastronomy.org to boards@irishastronomy.org so I could set up and auto-reply telling people that their message have NOT been delivered becasue we are NOT a mailing list.

The New Topic Notifications are already causing trouble, it will only get worse if everything is emailed out.

<snip> yet another avenue for us to hemmorage bandwidth.

I thought bandwidth was no longer going to be a problem in the near future?

In my opinion, IFAS should identify user needs then go satisfy those needs if that's the approriate thing to do. 'Appropriate' meaning is the technology available, do enough people want it, is there a cost... etc.

If we keep having discussions and threads like this one, my fear is the following:


IFAS affiliate member 1 'I would like...'
IFAS responsible person 1 'Good idea...'
IFAS responsible person 2 'No, because...'
IFAS responsible person 1 'Here's an alternative...'
IFAS affiliate member 2 'That's nice...'
IFAS responsible person 2 'No, because...'
IFAS affiliate member 1 'I'm off to the pub...'
IFAS affiliate member 2 'I'll join you...'
<some time later>
IFAS responsible persons 1 & 2 'Where is everyone?...'

And this isn't the first time we've been on this kind of merry-go-round...

Dave

Guys just a suggestion, but in my professional experience when changes like this needs to be done. The best thing is usually to form a change management committee with a brief to.

- Examine the current solution and identify weaknesses
- Draw up a list of proposed improvements.
- Look at the alternatives (software) for providing those improvements
- Quantitively evaluate each and decide upon the best solution.
- Prepare a cost/benefit analysis.
- Write it all up into a spec and hand it over to the development team.
- Monitor progress on development.
- Test the solution
- Sign off and put solution into production.

I'm not suggesting that IFAS go to those lenghts but I do suggest a more structured approach to move this all forward. Otherwise, like Dave says, the whole process just goes around in circles.

Just my 2 cent.