Hi Folks, A few thoughts on the list serve and in particular the archives. Having recently volunteered to help admin the list server along with Dave Scobie, I have been focused on technical stuff in the "back of the store" and in particular the archives. The archives can be easily accessed at the following link: https://mailman.xmission.com/lurker/list/montgomery_boats.en.html As best as I can see the searchable archives are complete and intact from late November 2001 up to September 2019. The search function is a little primitive but is simple to use. You can search for a post by any author, subject line or combination of words... The archive has huge amount of useful information in it with answers to a ton of questions and access to several decades of practical experience from Monty owners... The archives have suffered from intermittent periods where items were not accumulated/published on a timely fashion, and currently any postings after Sept 13th of this year have not appeared. I was under the impression that xmission was undergoing an archive upgrade early this fall, perhaps this is the cause of the current delay. I have an email in with xmission support asking for status. I will let you folks know the status as soon as I get an answer from them. As for migrating to groups.io, the current text based archives are quite modest in size, I estimate the current size to be around 60-80MB. So on the face of it a free account (1GB) could be readily used, however storage limits would likely require a paid account ($220/year) if photos and other attachments were allowed. Also there would be some work to migrate the data. It's certainly doable from a technical perspective, just not sure how much effort would be involved.
From my view, I have used the archives a lot and I find the list serve to be pretty effective, particularly when coupled with the photo site http://www.msogphotosite.com. As John Schinnerer's pointed out when you combine this with FB the information is scattered about.
In the end I think this is more of an issue about platform choices, & what people are comfortable with. In that vein I think there will always be multiple venues to fit different preferences. Keith *Keith R. Martin* *Vancouver/Burnaby B.C.* Serenity M17, #353 *http://www.msogphotosite.com/Scripts/Boats/boatsdetail.php?id=105 <http://www.msogphotosite.com/Scripts/Boats/boatsdetail.php?id=105>* On Tue, 31 Dec 2019 at 14:40, John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net> wrote:
Is anyone actually looking at/using the archives of this list?
I've hosted mailman groups for decades. In most cases the archive is barely or not at all used. One can sort a given month's posts by thread, subject, author, or date, but that's it - no all-archive search functionality. And if attachments are not archived then one has to save those oneself if one wants them later. If attachments are archived, it can eat up drive space and still not be that accessible.
So if nobody much cares about the current archives, and/or their usefulness is limited, and/or archiving is not even turned on in recent years, there's nothing much to lose, it would seem, if we shifted to groups.io.
And, if we just want a simple listserv (e-mail list) for this kind of communication, this does that fine.
As I understand it this list is a volunteer/freebie hosted by a member, which is great. Myself, I save any posts and/or attachments that I want for future reference, since I know that volunteer resources can vanish at any time, for the best of reasons even.
If this was a larger community of owners, it might be worth it to have a wordpress/buddypress (or equivalent platform) website of our own (think membership website + social media functionality, everything from posting your pics & projects in your own shared space to a forum-type interface for various conversations).
At this point that functionality is scattered among FB users, email list users, and the MSOG photo site.
Which is not a "problem" - just means some of us miss out on some of what's going on depending on which of those we use or pay attention to.
My 20 cents...
cheers, John
On 12/31/19 1:18 PM, Dave Scobie wrote:
Rusty and others:
Groups.io does essentially the same service as what we currently have through mailman software on xmission. the groups.io interface is nicer when visiting the groups www-site..
i don't know how much data (ie archives size) the email group has. over 1GB means minimum charge of $220/year for storage on groups.io.
migrating the members is a challenge. my experience is a group hostingand/or software change results in significant loss in group membership - like 85-90% for the i've taken part in a 'move'!!!
i also hate the idea of loosing the archives (though the recent data isn't currently being saved as I understand, only the really old stuff has been retained). i don't know if groups.io can transition anything in the mailman database. based on the yahoo.groups changes these last few months at minimum the charge will be $220.
the list isn't heavily used. the participation rate has really fallen off since about 2014/15. most of the activity is on the group site on Facebook (link - https://www.facebook.com/groups/330782353662726/ )
thoughts from the members?
:: Dave Scobie :: SV SWALLOW - https://sv-swallow.com :: Montgomery 6'8" #650 :: Truck camper - https://truckpopupcamper.wordpress.com/ :: Ramblings - https://scoobsramblings.wordpress.com/ :: former M17 owner #375 SWEET PEA - https://m17-375.com/ <http://www.m17-375.webs.com/> :: former M15 owner #288 - http://www.freewebs.com/m15-name-scred
On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 11:06 AM Rusty Knorr via montgomery_boats < montgomery_boats@mailman.xmission.com> wrote:
You should be using the groups io site instead of this!
www.rustyknorr.weebly.com
-- John Schinnerer - M.A., Whole Systems Design -------------------------------------------- - Eco-Living - Whole Systems Design Services People - Place - Learning - Integration john@eco-living.net - 510.982.1334 http://eco-living.net http://sociocracyconsulting.com