Do we Delete the Yahoo Group?

I have dissabled emails to the Yahoo Group and that will put an end to the spamm coming from there. THe question now is whether or not to Delete it.

I would say that it serves no purpose so we would be as well to delete it but I am leaving the decision up to you the members and the IFAS committee if they want to get involved.

Bart B.,
IFAS Webmaster.

I have dissabled emails to the Yahoo Group and that will put an end to the spamm coming from there. THe question now is whether or not to Delete it.

I would say that it serves no purpose so we would be as well to delete it but I am leaving the decision up to you the members and the IFAS committee if they want to get involved.

Bart B.,
IFAS Webmaster.

From conversations with various people, I think the main appeal of the Yahoo group is the ability to read AND reply to posts via e-mail, so removing e-mail will take away the Yahoo group's only advantage over the irishastronomy.org forum.

Bart, to clarify the e-mail issue:

Is it possible to receive e-mail notification of

every post to a forum by subscribing to that forum?

Is there

any possibility that people would be able to reply to posts via e-mail?

If the answer to both these questions were yes, then users could if they wished replicate the behaviour of the Yahoo group by subscribing to every topic they're interested in and then replying to posts by mail. I believe then that the new forum would have universal support.

Paul said

"Bart, to clarify the e-mail issue:

Is it possible to receive e-mail notification of

every post to a forum by subscribing to that forum?

Is there

any possibility that people would be able to reply to posts via e-mail?

If the answer to both these questions were yes, then users could if they wished replicate the behaviour of the Yahoo group by subscribing to every topic they're interested in and then replying to posts by mail. I believe then that the new forum would have universal support.[/quote]"

I am in agreement with Paul here, Bart. I would much prefer to passively participate in (or at least view) all topics without having to go to the website every time. I know that one can pick threads one is interested in, but this is a bit restricting, and I often find that a thread in which I have no initial interest, often evolves into one in which I might want to comment. The problem is the time it takes to peruse each and every thread to see what the latest posting is.

But then again, I am never quite sure that I am using the website features properly. For example, I cannot figure how to downoad a thread, store it, go offline and compose an answer, which is how I like to operate. This posting will take up something like twenty minutes of on-line time, whereas the Yahoo system took less than a minute.

We did discuss the possibility of a mini-tutorial at the last Whirlpool, but other things got in the way. Al mentioned that he might post something along these lines... Al?

D

Al mentioned that he might post something along these lines... Al?

I'll get to this when I get back to Dublin, I'd forgotten about it to be honest.

Cheers,
~Al

What I found speeds things up is to click the "View posts since last visit" line in the top right hand corner which I personally find extremely useful.

Also, instead of logging in and out every time, just log in once and click the box for "Remember Me". No need to continuously log in and out every time you want to check a posting.

Finally, try bookmarking the website or setting it as your home page.

Michael

Bart, to clarify the e-mail issue:

Is it possible to receive e-mail notification of

every post to a forum by subscribing to that forum?

Not at the moment. It is a feature that I could add to the site given a bit of time. It owuld be trivial to add a feature to mail every post on the entire board to those who want to recieve it but making it specific to certain forums would be signifficantly harder. It can be done and I would be happy to put in the work but it could take a few weeks.

Is there

any possibility that people would be able to reply to posts via e-mail?

I have been looking in to this for quite some time and the answer is theoretically yes but not on this server. We would need services that we simply do not have access to here. As well as that it would be extremely complicated from a security point of view becasue there is no way in hell I am opening this group up in such a way that it can get spammed to bits like the yahoo one was! I have a few ideas on how this security could be implemented but it is very much non-trivial.

Hope that answers your questions,

Bart B.,
IFAS Webmaster.