Re: (ET) Replacement of the Elec-Trak.com site

["Christopher Zach" <cz alembic crystel com>]

The real problem with any site is that when the site goes, the data is 
gone.
Check Geocities for an example.

In the US Electricar world we had a Yahoo group site that was pretty nice.
One day the owner of the site simply deleted it. Bye bye archives, bye
files, bye documents. Fortunately some of us had some copies, and we made a
new group. But that information is transitory. Same for the 944 groups, the
domain expired and suddenly a hundred people realized that the data was in
danger of being gone. So it was re-upped by some members.

Internet is great, but it is very ephemeral. Facebook will go the way of
myspace soon enough which went the way of altavista or meetup or whatever 
it
was.

C       

-----Original Message-----
From: David Roden [mailto:etpost drmm net] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2012 2:39 PM
To: elec-trak cosmos phy tufts edu
Subject: Re: (ET) Replacement of the Elec-Trak.com site

Is a web forum really necessary?  We could use some supplemental storage 
for
files here, I guess, but otherwise IMO this email list is quite
satisfactory.  I've visited the ET website.  Maybe it's just me, but I 
found
it awkward and frustrating to navigate, and haven't been back much since.

It's also much easier to administer a discussion list than a web forum.  
For
several years now, I've been managing the electric vehicle discussion list
(EVDL) by myself.  It had 1800+ subscribers, although only about 25% of 
them
were really active.  (We recently moved to a new server and only that 25%
followed.)

If you still want a webforum, why not consider what we do with the electric
vehicle discussion list (EVDL)?  We use Nabble.com as an archive and forum
front end for the list, for those who prefer that kind of interaction.  
Folks can work with it like any other webforum, and it forwards their posts
to the discussion list.  It also provides some limited file storage; but
really that's not much of a problem, with all the web file lockers now
available.  

Another way to get a webforum style interface to the mailing list would be
to use gmane.org. It doesn't seem to have the advanced features of Nabble,
but it's much faster.

Probably someone will suggest Yahoo Groups, and that's one answer, but I
personally prefer a less commercial solution.  Nabble is ad-supported, but
it's more subtle.

I'm looking forward to hearing others' thoughts.  And I do hope nothing
untoward has happened to Don.


David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA

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