From owner-freestyle@footbag.org Sun Sep 21 18:33:08 2003 Received: from llic.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by llic.net (8.12.3/8.12.3/Debian-6.6) with ESMTP id h8M1X7NK000390 for ; Sun, 21 Sep 2003 18:33:07 -0700 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by llic.net (8.12.3/8.12.3/Debian-6.6) id h8M1X6oY000384 for freestyle-outgoing@list.footbag.org; Sun, 21 Sep 2003 18:33:07 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: llic.net: majordom set sender to owner-freestyle@footbag.org using -f Received: from I (brat.footbag.org [209.125.90.60]) by llic.net (8.12.3/8.12.3/Debian-6.6) with ESMTP id h8M1X0NL000370 for ; Sun, 21 Sep 2003 18:33:00 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: brat@209.125.90.2 Message-Id: Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2003 18:32:53 -0700 To: freestyle@footbag.org From: Steve Goldberg Subject: [freestyle] ALERT: freestyle@footbag.org is going away Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-Scanned-By: Spam Scanner (MIMEDefang 2.21, footbag edition) Sender: owner-freestyle@footbag.org Subscribers to freestyle@footbag.org, This list is going away effective immediately. (Read on for details, though; the archives will remain forever!) It has been replaced with the online forum for Advanced Freestyle discussion at: http://www.footbag.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=4 We created the freestyle@footbag.org e-mail list on October 14, 1996 as an e-mail-based "online forum" for the discussion of advanced freestyle footbag. Over that period, literally 10,000 messages were exchanged between a list of approximately 1000 people at any point in the history of the list. The footbag.org e-mail list service was started even earlier, in 1994. Back then (almost a decade ago), very few people (especially footbag players :-)) were using the internet regularly. What's more, there was very little software available for building robust online communities. The majordomo listserve was the "state of the art" in online community tools (that's not saying much). We as a community were on the "bleeding edge" of new technology use, and this list and companion website helped propel most footbag players into an online community that allowed us to get where we are today. In the process, however, we burned out a lot of moderators, and made a lot of people angry because of the strict policies we had for managing the list. Most people don't believe this, but literally 80% of the messages we rejected over that period were because of "formatting" problems that would have seriously impacted the utility of the list. Issues from subject lines for proper threading, to From: headers containing bogus information, to invalid content formats (HTML being the worst offender), etc. It was almost impossible to manage all the details because we were using e-mail, and we couldn't control what some crazy e-mail program decided to do, or how people were using e-mail. And of course there was the spam problem, which is of course worse today than ever before. So, all in all, the majordomo e-mail-based forum was showing significant signs of wear, and was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Well -- over the last half-decade, there have been significant numbers of people getting involved in the "online community" space. Free software was popping up left and right for building online communities -- everything from file sharing to photo galleries to directories to FAQ systems to improved forums and communication systems. Unfortunately, before we could take advantage of any of these things on footbag.org, I needed to basically rewrite footbag.org from the ground up, in a way that allowed me to host other software on the system, and to focus on "integration" of that software so that it would truly be part of the single community (instead of making users log in separately, for example, to use certain functions). That effort -- rewriting footbag.org into php -- took me about 3 years off and on, and finally ended last year (I sent a big announcement about that). That set the stage for today's announcement: I'm very proud to announce one of hopefully many integrations of state-of-the-art functionality to help the footbag community using our footbag.org shared resource: the new, Footbag Forum, at http://www.footbag.org/forum/ This majordomo list will cease to exist (though the announce list will continue -- more on that later). We will be shutting it down very soon. No new posts will be accepted, and everyone is urged to post any thoughts they have on this project to the forum itself, at: http://www.footbag.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47 The archives will continue to exist forever; we may even clean up the user interface to make it easier to search for old articles as the archives become more of a repository for past discussions than an active online forum. The last thing we want (and we'll apply this reasoning to the forum as well) is for the "institutional memory" of many years of communication to just go away in a single instant. We want to keep these discussions archived so that future generations can see what we used to talk about, way back in the Dark Ages of the internet. :-) But for now, please give the new forum a try. Again, that's http://www.footbag.org/forum Oh -- and in case you're wondering... You don't need to think about your old mailing list subscriptions. We'll take care of removing them once we're ready, and you won't get e-mail from the retired list addresses again. Also, we'll be fixing up the announce list to be much easier to subscribe and unsubscribe from, since it'll be the only public list we support. For those of you with private lists on footbag.org (such as northeast and southbay), those lists will remain for now so there is no change to the way they work. However, you may want to consider using the new groups mechanism on footbag.org to create a group which allows you to have your own mailing lists attached to them. See http://www.footbag.org/groups (creating new groups is an IFPA members-only feature). Enjoy the new and improved forum. And thanks to those of you who have been on this forum since the beginning; it'll be kind of sad but also a big relief to shut this one down! :-) Steve P.S. Thanks also go to all the moderators who've spent countless hours dealing with this forum. From Jim Curtis to Brian Kimball to Derrick Fogle to Allan Haggett, this has been a truly thankless and monumental job. Nobody will know how much work they put into this. And special thanks to Pavel Belchev for work nobody will ever know he did, but I really appreciate it. I'm sure there are others I forgot to thank, but that'll do it for now. (Oh, yeah, and thanks to Mike Stoler for much energy invested in the project to create rec.sport.footbag on the Usenet forum; it still exists today but of course, this new forum is much cooler. :-) So anyone participating in that, be sure to point people to the new forum.) P.P.S. You'll need to become a member of footbag.org before you can post to the new forum; your old list membership will not carry over. If you once created an account but have since forgotten the password or changed e-mail addresses, simply follow the on-screen directions when it's time to log in (it's very clear if you read the directions). If you never had a footbag.org account, now's the time to create it!