Fri, June 25th, 2004 by Brandon Stone
I've created a discussion mailing list at Yahoo Groups called "Photoblogs". If you're interested, you can join by sending an email to:
photoblogs-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
It seems like a mailing list would be a good way for us to ask each other simple questions about photography or blogging or whatever. I'll also put a "Subscribe to Our Mailing List" link on the main Photoblogs.org site, so people know how to join.
Sound like a good idea? Also, if you have further suggestions or ideas about this, feel free to comment.
June 25th, 2004 at 10:41 am
I think the idea can work, but I don't really understand why the subscription needs to be judged by the moderator...
June 25th, 2004 at 11:12 am
Discussion lists have to be vetted in some way since it would be too easy for spammers to sign-up and have an instant pool of email addresses to target.
June 25th, 2004 at 11:33 am
yahoo's signup process seemed to be quite bot-proof for me, but whatever.
June 25th, 2004 at 11:57 am
I'm certainly open to suggestions. Does it make more sense to let it automatically accept new members? I think I just left it on the default setting.
If I have to manually validate every new member, that might become a pain for me. And if it really is bot-proof, then that might be a better way to go.
June 25th, 2004 at 1:31 pm
I belong to a few real good yahoo forums (one for vintage T-birds, and 2 for the APA) and they all have the moderator approve membership.
I have my forum accounts sent to a junk hotmail account, and all the mail gets put into my junk folder. I then access the messages through Entourage or hotmail directly. I guess my point on this is that it works great for me.
The messages can either be sent to the member as a daily digest or each message individually. This is great for scanning which topics you want to read. One thing is that if someone replys to a daily digest it just says "re:(apant) daily digest 1162" so you have no idea what the subject is. Well, APA has a great way of dealing with this, they do not allow it, it is in the rules not to reply without a proper re:subject, so if someone does, they close the thread, and trhe person has to re-post. Believe me, it gets old when folks reply like that so I think they handle it nicely.
also their rules for the forum are sent out every month.
Brandon, you will have to moderate or get a few people to moderate with you because things can get out of hands at times. Verbal fights, misuse, and WAy out of topic threads happen and sometimes members need to be banned.
I personally think it will be good for you to start this forum, but it will be a lot of moderation, and I personally think you should not let people join with out being validated.
June 25th, 2004 at 3:44 pm
I like mailing lists.
I really really really HATE yahoogroups. (if you need a reason, just look at the web interface to list archives -- evil stuff)
Any chance someone could host a photoblogs listerv somewhere else?
A privately operated, well moderated mailing list is far less prone to spam problems than a yahoogroup.
June 25th, 2004 at 5:15 pm
Steven, I'm not exactly sure what you mean about the archives being evil. Maybe you could explain a little further?
Currently, I have the archives turned off, so the list only exists in the email world and not in the web world.
Also, I can create a mailing list on the actual Photoblogs.org server using mailman or majordomo, but I just figured it was easy to use Yahoo Groups. So that's what I did.
June 25th, 2004 at 8:25 pm
I'm a moderator of another Yahoo! group, and in it I moderate posts but not membership. Email addresses are not visible to spammers (so far as I can tell). Posts which are spam I don't approve... Once someone seems "certified" I no longer moderate their posts.
June 25th, 2004 at 9:36 pm
I'd like to advocate for having archives because:
1. I like them -- I switched all my Yahoo groups subs to 'no email' when I went on vacation last year and haven't switched back. It's much easier for me to visit the site once or twice a week and scan through the threaded subject listing than deal with the hundreds of daily e-mails (the 'digest' option can be an incomprehensible nightmare on high-traffic lists).
2. I don't want to give them any of the e-mail addresses I actually check -- Yahoo's privacy policy leaves a bit to be desired; the Yahoo-specific addresses (yahoo-groupname@mydomain.com) I signed up for various accounts with were instantly deluged with spam, even though I'm stringent about checking all the 'no' boxes and don't sign up on any lists where the members are displayed. The Yahoo email accounts you get when you sign up (one of which I now use as my contact address for groups signup) are similarly filled, even though I don't use them for *anything*.
3. Archives are just nice -- New members might be interested in that which has gone before and it would hopefully cut down on the reptition of basic questions. There *are* people who will do a search to see if their question has already been asked before posting it...
That said, I think of this blog as being a place where I can come for answers to those "simple questions," and having a mailing list as well seems a bit redundant. (Yeah, I know, I just posted to the earlier mail list the other day, but I was thinking that was something that would fit perfectly on a bulletin board *nudgenudgehinthint I'll install it for ya*)
p.s. The bots are only following orders and are certainly not the only way those dagnasty sp*mmers are getting to you -- they like to do things manually, too, just to vex you, and their crap appears on moderated lists, too.
June 26th, 2004 at 1:18 am
Brendon: will it be a moderated or unmoderated group? A moderated one can be a LOT OF WORK, a unmoderated one might become a chaos like many others.
Just see the Editorialphoto Yahoogroup: it works because it is moderated since years, that means you have invest time and efforts, at least 1h/day extra.
Best,
Phototalk
June 28th, 2004 at 1:12 am
Brandon..
List archives are not evil - the yahoogroups web interface to "group" archives just sucks. You get full page ads every third or fourth message you view... the search feature just blows (only searches part of the list archive at a time)... etc.
A general problem with mailing list archives is they will sometimes expose your mailing address if other people quote your original message - but I don't know of any archive solutions that really fix this.
June 28th, 2004 at 8:01 am
Steven, I know what you're saying. I figured I'd just turn off the archives completely so people don't have to worry about:
1) Their email addresses being exposed on the web.
2) The world having a permanent record of some stupid email that they wrote.
In the past I've been personally bothered when mailing lists have created permanent web archives of me being a moron in an email. (Of course, if I choose to be a moron on the web, that's fair game.)
I see this blog as a public forum where we're all aware that anyone can see what we write, but I view the mailing list as a more private forum where we can ask "stupid" questions or make more off-handed remarks, etc.
I hope that makes sense.
June 28th, 2004 at 11:51 am
Brandon,
1. Yahoo mangles e-mail addresses in the archive display by sticking in ellipses where some of the text was (so it ends up being like brandon@p...) and when you click on the address, it makes you input your pw again, then takes you to a response form that e-mails that person but still doesn't show the full address.
I just went through about 20 threaded messages and the address was still garbled even when it was several levels down in responses...
2. You can set the archives (*and* view member list, as well as anything except the index) to member view only. When I set up groups, I also turn off the 'display group in Yahoo directory' and have never received member requests from anyone who wasn't valid...and I'm sure the conspiracy theorists out there will agree with me that even a list that's solely e-mail based is no guarantee that what you send to the list isn't being picked up by people not on the list, especially when it's being funneled through Yahoo.
July 3rd, 2004 at 5:22 pm
how about a message board? This seems to work better than yahoogroups.