[C320-list] Mailing List or Forum

[Jeff Hare]

Great discussion, albeit not really a sailing topic. 

Here's a bit on how we got where we are, for the newer members:  (Hope it
isn't too long)

Our Site & List have been owned/sponsored by different outside entities over
the years:   Rod Boer was doing the website solo before I stepped up to help
around 2002-ish.  I think he's the longest serving board member now and may
hold the record nobody wants to try and break. :)

 * Sailnet  - originally hosted our list and website.  They went belly up in
the middle of the night and took our discussion history and website content.
At the time, we were a month away from holding our annual
Meeting/Regatta/Party and all our lines of communication to our membership
and organizers suddenly got cut off.  Took quite a while to recover
ownership of our catalina320.com domain name.  That wasn't fun.

 * SailJazz - The founders of Sailnet started up SailJazz and "hijacked" our
old membership list and insisted on owning the content.  They later started
charging for participation (more fracturing of the group).  We bailed and
said no thanks and started over again.

 * OnSmart - We moved hosting to this company and had limited control.  It
worked pretty well but went belly up after a few years, and took time to
recover our domain name again.  More lost discussion history and website
content because backup was severely limited.

See a pattern there?

Finally we chose to control our own destiny.  We moved to our current host
(Dreamhost) around 2006 where we had full control, just like having our own
machine.  We partitioned the Website and Discussion list to different
systems and domain names so that we would be far less likely to lose both
the website and the discussion list due to some failure.

 We now have offsite backups of discussion history and website so we can now
quickly recover.  We push our discussion list content out to Google Groups
in Forum format because we assume Google knows how to search  :)
Unfortunately WE have NO ownership of content posted in Google groups and
they could dump any/all history at any time, so we can't rely on it
entirely.  (This is pretty much standard behavior)

We chose to host our own discussions in a mailing list so that we had solid
ownership of the content in a plain text format.  Members can bulk download
all discussion history content in text format for private use offline.  We
also have decent (nothing's perfect) protection against virus infested email
going out to our list by disallowing attachments and converting HTML to
simple text.  That's the reason it looks "antique", but it's a safety
tradeoff these days. 

We hoped we can someday distill the good discussion history content into
Website FAQs and articles.  With plain text format, it's not hard to hand
someone a text file and say go find the goodies in there and make Q&A
topics.   I had hoped to use our website's Wiki for organizing it, since it
allows members to go in and update or add to the content as they see fit
without needing special permission.

Unfortunately, there hasn't been enough volunteer manpower to accomplish
this, nor do we have enough paid members to allow us to $hire$ an internet
firm to do the development of such systems.  As a result, the site
development / recovery from hackers & site spammers / Site & List upgrades
and maintenance falls back to whatever time I happen to have available and
whoever I can rope into helping with various tasks.  

I spend 10 hrs a day sitting at a computer writing software as it is and
when the weekend rolls around I have to decide whether I'm also going to
spend the weekend in front of the screen.  Good thing Shelly changes the
pictures of my kids as they grow!  Wouldn't want to mistake one of them for
the neighbor kid.  :)

Therein lies the problem... Unless a bunch of people want to step up to the
plate,  I'm all ears but limited in ability to act.   :)   It's rarely the
initial setup of new features that's the issue,  that's really easy.  It's
the long term support commitment required to keep it all running as smoothly
for years on end that wears us all down.

The current and past board members have really been impressive in handling a
lot of the tasks that should fall under the website/c320-list management
area, and for that I am very grateful. Without their help I would have been
wearing a white coat and living in a rubber room a long time ago.  I also
really appreciate all the encouraging letters from the group.  I'm confident
the board will do everything we are able to do in order to improve what we
have, but it'll still be in the form of many of baby-steps unless we get
some volunteers stepping up.

As always, we love volunteers and member suggestions!  :) 

Cheers!
-Jeff

2001 #809 Woodbine II  (Unfortunately *without* air conditioning in this
blasted heat)