[Orca-users] Orca mailing lists moving and restructing

[Blair Zajac]

Hello,

I'm working on moving the Orca mailing lists off of Yahoo! Groups due to
the advertising appearing in email messages and in the archives up on
groups.yahoo.com which gets in the way of browsing the archives.  I'll be
hosting the mailing lists at orcaware.com using Mailman.

The only outstanding issue is the number of mailing lists and what to do
with them.  Right now we have 4 and here's the traffic and usage breakdown
since July 1999:

List			People		Messages
------------------------------------------------
orca-announce		149		  10
orca-developers		 83		 187
orca-discuss		154		 254
orca-users		323		1710

I haven't been too happy with the number of mailing lists and I'm thinking to
trim the list to 2, orca-announce and orca-users, for several reasons:

1) Reduce the number of email lists people need to sign up for.
2) Reduce the fragmentation of discussions.  Right now a good discussion on
   one mailing list may miss people that signed up for another mailing
   list.

The only modification to this plan I see is to keep orca-developers for people
that do actual development and don't want to see the normal traffic.  If
there's a significant number of people that want this, let me know.  I don't
know yet how many requests will deem significant, so we'll play this by ear.

The other outstanding question is the best way to migrate everybody's email
address off of Yahoo! into Mailman and keeping their preferences, such as
getting digests, reading the list on the web, etc.  Any input on this would
be welcome.

Best,
Blair

-- 
Blair Zajac <blair at orcaware.com>
Web and OS performance plots - http://www.orcaware.com/orca/