[CW] Why so many groups?

[Bill Clarke]

Everyday I check several CW forums. Among them is the Brass Pounders, CW Bugs, SolidCpyCW, and SKCC all found on Yahoo Groups. I then check SKCC's forum, the RadioTelegraphy Forum, and several CW mail lists on QTH. There are others as well, but I won't list all of them here. I am sure you get the idea by now. 

A large percentage of the traffic is repeated on two or more places and involves various contests or events and welcome messages to new comers. There is very little in the line of traffic about the hardware used - but, there have been forever long postings about various aspects of RST or AK vs SK, etc.

I recommend that a single group, forum, list be selected for all of it. One stop shopping, if you will.  A PHP type forum would be my choice, such as SKCC or RadioTelegraphy. However, neither currently carry much traffic - and RadioTelegraphy would need to develop or expand into several traffic categories.

The advantage of the PHP type forum is the search capabilities and ease of browsing for posts made since the user's last visit.

Of course, it may just be me. Maybe I am the only op around that doesn't really enjoy visiting a number of sometimes mediocre places when a single full service location could do it all. Kind of like a big-box store which is a destination, versus ten smaller stores at varied locations.

A really good PHP type forum could have categories for SKCC, contests, hellos, keys, antennas, or whatever. Perhaps this idea could be added to http://forums.qrz.com/index.php - which is already a great place to visit.

Something to think about and discuss. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/cw/attachments/20081123/7b3982fd/attachment-0001.htm