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NFC: Re: Sunfish: LIst Survey
Joshua L Wiegert wrote:
> 1: What sublists do you belong to?
Not sure. I signed up for several, and even got notifications that I
was now a member of them, but haven't seen any traffic on them. Judging
from this header I think this is the first message I've gotten on the
sunfish list.
> 2: Did you know we had all these sublists?
Yes but unless something is broken on my end, I haven't been seeing
msgs.
> 3: Do you know the address for Santa Claus? If so, what is it, and why
> do I get so much coal?
Santa doesn't get postal mail at the north pole. Santa has email. But
the problem is, his site runs Microsoft Exchange so he very often
doesn't get his mail as the server cannot keep up with the 3 or 4 mails
that Santa gets per day.
> 4: Where you previously aware that I was list administrator?
No. Would be nice to see this in the canned msg footer. :-)
> 4b: If not, have you ever wanted to contact the list admin. and not known
> how?
Yes. Because of a mis-configured header in list messages that caused my
server to send a bounce every time someone posted. :-)
> 5: Have you ever thought you should have contacted the list administrator
> and not done so?
Well I ended up broadcasting my message to the list and I *think* it got
straightened out. Not sure.
> 5b: If so, why? (Feel free to generalize this.)
> 5c: If not, have you ever contacted the list admin. or someone else with a
> problem, and if so what was it?
> 6: Are frequent "non member submission's" (I.e., mail I fwd onto the
> list) a problem to you?
The big gripe I have is when forwarded messages are sent as
attachments. I think it would be better to send them as the body of the
message.
> 7: Are attachments a problem?
Yeah. It's a real bugger because if you archive all of your email (and
I do) the use of attachments makes messages unnecessarily large. If
special formatting were required, I'd rather have a URL in the message
with a short summary and let me go out to the web server to view it.
> 8: Would you like to see a FTP site for attachemnts (esp. id this fish
> questions) to be uploaded to?
Would rather see a web site. ftp can be a pain.
> Such a site may become a victim of SPAM or unwanted files reaching it.
> Would you a: Like to see it stay open? b: Like me to work harder by
> 'screening' uploads and then sending them on myself? c: Like someone to
> just screen and delete junk from it?
I'd like to have some sort of authentication necessary to post messages
to such a site.
> Would you visit such a site at all?
Errrrm... I dunno... depends on how slick and trouble-free the
implementation is.
> 9: Would you like to see the reposted articles added to a FTP site like
> that?
Again, would rather avoid FTP.
I'd like to see the web-based archives working though. :-) (last time
I checked the URL's were invalid)
> b: SHould new ones still be sent to lists?
As long as they are plain text.
Posting them to the web site, and sending out a notification w/ short
summary would IMHO be much nicer.
> 10: Should I be given a stipend with whcih to buy a new computer with?
Only if I get one too. :-)
> 11: Would you like to see the NFC get a server and/or domain to contain
> its mailing lists?
YES.
> b: web page?
YES.
> c: E-mail addy's of "staff?"
YES. And committees.
> 12: Do you find cross posts to the lists excessive (i.e., mail to sunfish
> and NFC, etc.) ?
Hadn't noticed.
> 13: If so, any suggestions on fixing it?
Rule suggestion: the only messages that should be crossposted are
administrative messages. I think that messages that deal with multiple
groups of fishes should be posted to the general list.
> 14: Any suggestions for the web-life of NFC at all?
Actually there is quite a bit of room for growth there, IMHO.
> 15: Will lisab at netrover_com (LisaBabe) go out with me next Friday?
*shaking magic 8-ball* - "Answer fuzzy. Try again."
> 16: Do you believe in a corrolation between flavour and colour of M&M's?
All the other M&M's just wish they were green.
Getting back to the server idea.... yes, I like this. For about $75 we
could own a domain for two years. For about $25 per month we could have
100MB of storage.
I think the web site is great but it needs a little more regular
maintenance. For example, there are many broken links. It would be
pretty easy to point a utility at the site which would search out and
report on all broken links. If you don't mind the intrusion, I could
probably run such a script from here and send it if you are interested.
I like the idea of email addresses for the staff & officers. I also was
thinking, if it doesn't exist already, that it would be nice to have a
mailing list for regional leaders to talk amongst each other to talk
about fund raisers, public awareness activities, etc. to find out what
works and what doesn't and maybe share some material.
As for handling email attachments... I had an idea but lack the perl
scripting skills to implement it... I was thinking that if majordomo was
custom scripted for the NFC, it would be possible to do something like
this: when an email with an attachment is sent to the mailing list, the
full message with attachment is included on the web-based archives, but
in the email version the attachment is removed and replaced with a link
to the archive version of the article. This way I could, say, send a
message describing a fish I found and send a picture attached to the
message. The mail server strips the picture, puts a link to it in its
place, and copies the file to the web server mailing list archive. So
anyone who is interested in seeing the picture just clicks on the URL
and off they go. Email messages stay nice and small, and it doesn't
take 30 minutes to download your email. :-) Considering the price of
hard disk space today, it would be MUCH cheaper to store it centrally
than to store many copies of it all over the country.
--
Chris Hedemark
Email: chris at yonderway_com ICQ: 28986378
Rural Living at Yonder Way - http://www.yonderway.com/rural
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