NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Admin: EVERYBODY please read
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 Nov 22, 17:33 -0800
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 Nov 22, 17:33 -0800
A number of people have written describing some things they use on the google groups message boards: "Reply to Author", as opposed to sending a message to everyone in NavList, is one request. That's definitely do-able, and I will implement that soon. Also, we have a request for some of the posting statistics available at google groups. That's also possible, but I would say lower priority. For now, I would like to ask what sort of statistics people would like to see. What would be useful or even just entertaining? Graphs of message posting volume? Total message bandwidth? Pie charts of posting volume by member? Any other ideas? Email me off-list. People have also offered lots of more general advice on technical aspects of NavList, and so I would like to say that I would be happy to hear any request for changes from all members. Feel free. Be imaginative. What would you like to see? If NavList was the PERFECT online community for traditional navigation discussion and collaboration, what would it be like? Again, I prefer to hear from you on this topic by off-list email to FrankReed[at]HistoricalAtlas.com, but it's not a rule. I want to re-assure everyone that I am not going to make any changes that will change the fundamental email side of NavList. Those of you who have interacted solely by email will continue to do so, and you will see no significant changes. -------------------------------------------------------- A little history, intended primarily for those of you who have joined NavList in the past two or three years: NavList is the continuation (or descendant, or evil step-child, depending on your point of view) of a group originally called simply "Navigation" or the "Navigation Mailing List" or "Nml" for short which was hosted on "ronin.com" in the late 1990s. I don't know much about it back then, and I don't know who was the manager. It was a low-volume email community with a couple of dozen posts per month. Dan Hogan rescued the Navigation list when ronin.com could no longer host it. At that time, it was slightly renamed as "Navigation-L" which was a popular style of academic mailing list naming back around 1999 and the hosting was transferred to a service called "webkahuna.com". The group was also frequented referred to as "Nav-L" or "Nav List". Around the year 2000, email communities or "mailing lists" and their associated "list servers" reached a peak of popularity for social and academic communication and collaboration, and then, like just about everything on the Internet, their popularity began to plummet. Thus many new members of today's NavList may be a little puzzled by the formation of the name (list? what list?). Also around this time, someone quite unconnected with the Navigation list opened a nice web archive on the web site i-DEADLINK-com which displayed Nav List messages in real time and generated a little advertising revenue for its creator. For some members, this irbs site became the primary means of reading messages. It began to resemble an online message board but with no means to post. Importantly, these archives began to be indexed by search engines, and this led to a large increase in the size of the Nav List community. I myself found the Navigation List via posts indexed by google and finally joined in December of 2003. It was growing rather rapidly at that time. Unfortunately, starting in 2005 and especially in 2006, the Navigation List servers at webkahuna.com began to suffer from crashes. Also, but unrelated, the archive at i-DEADLINK-com experienced a number of long outages. In late March 2006, the webkahuna list server went completely dead for some days. At that point, I opened the current "NavList" on google groups. The webkahuna service came back to life shortly thereafter, and lasted for a couple of months, and there was some considerable contention over whether to shift to new servers or not. I put it all on hold in June 2006 and then just four weeks later, the old service on webkahuna closed permanently, without notice. And that's how we got on google groups with me as the principal list manager (historically, the person who opens a mailing list has been known as a "list owner" but there's nothing really owned and there's no power in the position). Ironically, despite the decline in prominence of mailing lists for serious discussions, they are more popular than ever for simple group communication and services like Google Groups and Yahoo Groups are available for free, supported by a small amount of advertising. Dan Allen is also a list manager of NavList. He has since moved on to other interests so he doesn't post much but he's still out there! Having moved to new mailing list servers, we needed something to replace the irbs archive boards which many people found useful. Google groups has some similar functionality but it's rather clunky and it's not under our control, so I put some considerable time, and some money, into building the message boards which many of you now use at fer3.com/arc. They incorporated a long and nearly complete collection of messages which Dan Allen had kept during his years in the group going all the way back to those early "ronin.com" messages (if you look at the message IDs at fer3.com/arc you will see that posts from then are tagged with "r", later during the webkahuna days, they're tagged "w", and current google groups messages are tagged "g"). At first, the message boards at fer3.com did not include posting features. I added that functionality finally in 2008. NavList now functions like other online forums and message boards as well as a traditional mailing list. It is entirely possible to participate without even knowing that one can "subscribe" by email, and in fact the word "subscribe" now causes confusion to some new members (if you invite anyone to join, I recommend that you just point them to the message boards unless they're used to the idea of mailing lists). What we're doing now, if it happens, is shifting to new mail servers for the email aspect of NavList. Again, most people should notice no differences. And there's more to come... In the near future (maybe January), there will be some interesting features added to the message boards at fer3.com which should allow for more structure in posts, better mathematical discussions, and in some ways a style more consistent with navigational literature. Again, feel free to contact me off-list if you have any questions and especially any great ideas for the future of NavList. The members are the real "owners" of NavList. It's your content that makes this a valuable community. The technical aspects like list servers and message boards and statistics and formatted posts do support that content and make it more enjoyable but they are secondary. I'm interested in hearing any ideas, but I don't want to create a distraction from the main purpose of NavList. -FER -- NavList message boards: www.fer3.com/arc Or post by email to: NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList+@fer3.com