>One reason the quality of the list was so high in the past, I believe, was
>the ability of a subscriber to do sophisiticated filtering so as to only see
>the threads and/or posters considered worthwhile. Now we have to do this in
>our own mail programs, which means downloading everything.
I'm not sure what is so bad about "downloading everything" if you have
filters set up on the client side. Does it take a long time via modem?
>There is definitely a point of diminishing returns. Max, is there any chance
>of charging some fee and getting hold of a list management program that can
>do filtering like the old one did? If some solution isn't developed for this
>problem, this list is going to rapidly degrade, because people who are only
>peripherally involved will be forced to disengage.
One possible solution would be to make the list available via an nntp
server so you would be able to use your favourite newsreader (including
the latest Netscape and Internet Explorer) to read new messages, peruse
and search the archives, and do sophisticated client side filtering via
kill files (or whatever the newsreader provides). Has anyone seen this
(mailing list -> newsgroup gateway) done? If so, I'd appreciate some
pointers.
-- David McFadzean david@ideosphere.com Memetic Engineer http://www.ideosphere.com/~david/ Ideosphere Inc. http://www.ideosphere.com