Re: List Administration ...

["William J. Kammerer" <wkammerer@foresightcorp.com>]

Bill Mattox, of Viacore, said "...one gentleman at the recent meeting in
Brussels referred to [the number of messages being pumped out by the
listserver] as bordering on SPAM, and particularly problematic for those
who travel a great deal and therefore forced to use slow links...
especially when the mail includes attachments."

I may have been the most vocal criticizing the habit of posting again
and again the same attachments.  But my good friends in BP have now
figured out how to get their documents uploaded to the server so the
rest of us can choose, or choose not, to download them at our leisure.

Bill further muses "has anyone considered replacing this with a
discussion server? That would not only provide a message tree structure
for reconstructing the history of a particular thread, but would be a
pull, as opposed to a push method, of communication, which would be far
more practical insofar as it would allow the end user to control the
message bandwidth."

I don't think there's any need for OASIS to spend time and money on
exotic Web technology when e-mail and the listserver works fine as they
are, assuming 1) cross-posting is kept to a minimum, 2) listserve
junkies don't sign up (those who sign up for each and every list they
hear of, from Basque separatism to recovering Catholics, and then
complain loudly on the listserve that they want to get off), 3)
appropriate subject headings are chosen, 4) people don't keep the full
text of each and every message in the thread at the bottom of their own
message - summarize instead (if it's not worth summarizing the messages
being responded to, then it's probably not worth responding), and
finally - the most important - 5) big files are not attached, but rather
placed in the working pages of the relevant teams.

For those who don't want to get e-mail on ebXML throughout the day, they
may choose a digest mode subscription (if available).  Or better yet,
they can remove themselves from the lists and simply review the archives
on a periodic basis.  OASIS needs to clean up their archives act, but in
general the archives are available at http://www.xml.org/archives/.  The
links are incorrect - for example, if you select EBXML-TRANSPORT, you'll
get "The page cannot be found."  But all you have to do is go to the
browser address line and remove trailing "maillist.html".  From there,
you'll be able to review the cumulative monthly archives, or look at the
hMonArc HTML archives organized by year and month.

William J. Kammerer
FORESIGHT Corp.
4950 Blazer Memorial Pkwy.
Dublin, OH USA 43017-3305
(614) 791-1600

Visit FORESIGHT Corp. at http://www.foresightcorp.com/
"Commerce for a New World"



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