Thoughts (as a listmember, not as admin):

Modern web-based forum probably is "better" for some users. But as Gary Bawden said in the post just prior to yours, " Many of us who live out in the boonies find dealing with websites to be a PITA (slow speeds, etc.)" Not everyone lives where broadband is available. Hook up you dial up modem and go to www.yahoo.com. See how long it take to load.... Fer instance, at work I connect to an OC12. At home I connect to a .75 Mbps WISP. Many folks in my area have no choice but 53 k dial-up. If I have to do extensive web work, I do it at work. BIG difference between 740 k down and 42,000 k down. Email works fine on dial-up. Especially text only e-mail. As someone else mentioned today, the mean message size is less than 5 k.

In fourteen years, I've not experienced your reported difficulty in responding to posts. I send a question and within seconds it is in 900 folks mailboxes. I usually have to wait about ten minutes before I start getting responses. My life isn't in such a rush that waiting ten minutes is going to seriously impact any project I may have going. Furthermore, I'd prefer a 'considered' response. As an aside, I also have gmail and yahoo mailboxes. In both cases I get just exactly the performance I pay for. My 'real' mailbox (this one) receives list posts in seconds. Gmail in minutes and yahoo in hours if at all. The absolute worst is/was hotmail.

Photos? You've not heard of Flickr? Picasa? Shutterfly? A Google of "free image hosting" yields over 13 million hits. Personally, I use Picasa. You could even use the 'spare' list's photo section on Yahoogroups. Why should vanagon.com burn up HDD space and bandwidth hosting images when there are so many other alternatives? Sending a link is easy.

Searches: Agreed that gerry gets swamped searching 14 years of posts. Probably 200/day times 14 years. You do the math. New hardware will help, but searches will never be blazing fast. Not with a single box. I use the horsepower of the Google farms. Enter <search string> site:gerry.vanagon.com into your Google toolbar.

I am not 'resisting' any changes. I just do not have a burning desire to change for change sake. This list has had about the same number of members for over a decade. I've seen fewer than twenty listmembars clamor to change the format. Setting up a forum might very well be easy. It seems to be your preference. Why don't you do it? This list has spawned numerous other technical discussion groups. Type2, Vintagebus (now almost all on TheSamba), California Camping Crazies, WetWesties, the various conversion and speciality lists, etc, etc, etc. Start your forum let us know about it and see where it goes.

Respectfully,

Jim

On Aug 27, 2008, at 9:30 AM, David Kao wrote:

> Making change will always get resistance, including from myself. > But a modern forum no doubt is far better than the old list platform. > Yahoo, Gmail and probably most other mail programs are all web based. > So a web based forum is not going to be any slower, if the graphic > content and java scripts are kept at a minimum. > > Setting up a modern forum is not difficult. They are free from many > web hosting sites. But cost of web hosting could grow out of control > if traffic out of the forum site grows out of control. > > With the current list platform it is impossible to respond to posts > interactively. Yahoo very often delays list emails until the next > morning. It is very difficult to search the archive. There is no > storage for photos. Many of the discussion are taken offline so > a lot of discussions are started on the list but get offline and > gone afterwards. > > Why resisting the change? > > David