[Lowfer] the LOWFER forum

[John D]

And so we do, yet again, have another way of fragmenting the distribution of 
information.

When e-mail started becoming too unreliable to sustain the high volume of 
activity on the LWCA LowFER reflector, some of you may recall that I asked 
what members thought about a number of possible alternatives.  One of those 
was to add file capability to the 12-year-old EXISTING forum site, the LW 
Message Board.  Another was to spend the dough to enable support for a more 
modern forum, such as Ted's.

The Top Four Reactions to these ideas included:
* Near total silence to the idea that a volunteer would be needed to manage 
the file section.  (We actually did get one volunteer, but only two or three 
people ever sent him a file, and then he dropped out of the hobby entirely 
for personal reasons.)
* Converting the LW Message Board to a modern-style forum would have 
entailed setting up categories, and some users objected to having to decide 
whether their posts belonged under NDB, LWBC, LowFER, or HiFER.
* "Well, instead of asking us what we want, why don't you just go ahead and 
spend the money and see if anyone uses it."  (A few even had the nerve to 
append the old saying "you've got to spend money to make money," the 
relevance of which eludes me to this day.  You've also got to spend money to 
waste money, which I've done more than my share of maintaining lwca.org, so 
that's why I asked for feedback.  Interestingly, we HAVE had that capability 
for 12 months now, and nobody asked for it until the past two days when I've 
been out of town!  Go figure.)
* And the Number One Response to Any Suggestion of Switching to a Forum: 
"Oh no, no no.  I don't want to have to click my browser to get information! 
I want it to come in with my e-mail without lifting a finger."  (Numerous, 
numerous responses of that sort.  THAT is why previous forum attempts have 
died, folks!  I marvel that anyone is willing to try again.  We'll see if 
anything has changed this time, I guess.)

FWIW, the only way to handle the daily hassle of ISPs labelling e-mail 
groups as spam is to have your own e-mail server _and_ a staff dedicated to 
dealing with these issues every single day.  The folks at QTH.NET deserve 
our undying gratitude for their near-miraculous results!!!

Of course, part of their approach to dealing with the ongoing problems of 
e-mail has been the very restrictions y'all have been chafing about: no HTML 
decorative fluff (oh how some folks pitched a fit about that decision on the 
LWCA LowFER list!) and no file attachments whatsoever.  But with practices 
like that, and constant vigilance, our gracious hosts here have managed to 
maintain a level of service here that I would not have believed possible.

(Also FWIW:  The LWCA site has not yet dropped the HiFER group because the 
activity was so low we slipped under the radar with most ISPs.  However, 
with the recent increase of activity we've had there, the blacklisting 
problem is cropping up on that list more frequently too.  Its days are 
numbered.)

So what's the verdict--is this reflector going to survive, or is everyone 
going to shift elsewhere?  Let's don't just split things up further just for 
the sake of having something new to play with.  I don't have time to follow 
news on four or five locations that all used to be available in one or two, 
and I don't know many others have that kind of time either.  Which will it 
be?

John