----- Original Message -----
From: "Mathew Ray" <mathew@...>
>
> I agree to a degree... One issue is that several people I have mentioned
> this list to will not sign up due to the commercial nature of
> yahoogroups and their spam/privacy policy. The potential hassle is not
> worth it to them, and as silly as it sounds, the Yahoo affiliation
> doesn't do much for the image of the group.

This was discussed in the early days and at that time it was not a problem
for the vast majority of people, other than the minor hassle of creating a
Yahoo ID for those who did not have one already.

FWIW, Yahoo's spam policy isn't as bad as it's made out to be, and although
Yahoo groups tend to be the target of random spammers, I set the group to
first post moderated a long time ago to combat that problem. So although I
see a small number of spam messages, not one has made it through to the
list. The only thing we do get occasionally is spam uploads in the files
area, but those are deleted pretty quickly.

Hopefully it won't be an issue too much longer anyway....

> Is there an easy way of
> setting up the same functionality on the website? I may be able to
> provide some of that functionality with a portal system on my server if
> it would be helpful.

Yes and no. The site is still in development and one of the things I'm
working on is a dual-ported mailinglist manager to handle sub-groups and
other useful things, but which allows people to use either email or the
website. This is actually relatively easy to set up with plain text emails
only, but the problem is the number of MIME types that now exist, so it
could take some time to get working reliably.

However, if the new interest in the group is going to be significantly
dampened by the Yahoo group issue then I should be able to set up a standard
mailinglist fairly quickly. I've just avoided doing this until now because I
don't want to go around changing things that may change again in the future,
causing whatever disruption to the people already on the list. If there is a
lot of discussion on Direct-L and a significant number of people are
unwilling to join the Yahoo group then I will certainly make sure we have
another mailinglist quickly, to avoid losing the new momentum.

- Robert