Good to see to many people speaking up about the mailinglist.
Having some experience with communications using new media,
I like to comment on two points:
a) Mailinglists can be nicely integrated with the Web and News.
So you would get most of the advantages of an web forum, if you
use an additional webarchive. You can also add a web->mail interface.
The Grass user community might even think about creating a newsgroup.
This is usually what should happen if the community is very big and
a bunch of Mailinglists aren't sufficient anymore.
b) Maintaining a few Mailinglists is quite easy and even
less work than maintaining a web forum.
It can be nontrivial to set up a mailinglist or to maintain it.
(Depending on the size). But usually, all you need is a Unix machine
an a modern ML software and then it is relatively easy.
It should be done in a few hours (like a day) depending on your
experience.
I recomment GNU Mailman (http://www.list.org),
because it seems to be very low on maintaince, because most of it
can be done over the web it is automatically done.
It largely manages itself and has both email and web management
facilities for every users.
I offer help to get someone started with Mailman.
Bernhard
On Wed, Jun 02, 1999 at 01:42:26PM -0500, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
Good to see to many people speaking up about the mailinglist.
Having some experience with communications using new media,
I like to comment on two points:
a) Mailinglists can be nicely integrated with the Web and News.
So you would get most of the advantages of an web forum, if you
use an additional webarchive. You can also add a web->mail interface.
The Grass user community might even think about creating a newsgroup.
This is usually what should happen if the community is very big and
a bunch of Mailinglists aren't sufficient anymore.
The way we did this with a few projects I am involved in is to use a news
server not connected to the usenet. It saves a lot of spam.
b) Maintaining a few Mailinglists is quite easy and even
less work than maintaining a web forum.
It can be nontrivial to set up a mailinglist or to maintain it.
(Depending on the size). But usually, all you need is a Unix machine
an a modern ML software and then it is relatively easy.
It should be done in a few hours (like a day) depending on your
experience.
I recomment GNU Mailman (http://www.list.org),
because it seems to be very low on maintaince, because most of it
can be done over the web it is automatically done.
It largely manages itself and has both email and web management
facilities for every users.
I run about 12 mailing listts with about 1500 subscribers on ezmlm ( qmail )
It's pretty straight forward, and it is very fast. So you can use that old
Sparc IPX, if you want.. 
--Jack
The number of computer scientists in a room is inversely proportional
to the number of bugs in their code.
====-=-==== Jack (John) Cummings == cummings@nyquist.ee.ualberta.ca ====-=-====
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