latest apologies for personal posting

[George Fowler]

SEELangers,

Ernest Scatton wrote:

>Heh, heh. The SEELANGS demon strikes again. Does anyone feel the need for
>a moderated list? Someday someone is gonna say something they're really
>gonna regret.

Yes. Actually, since Ernie makes this suggestion, let me toss in a word or
two. As George Mitrevski announced on Feb. 11, there's a new AATSEEL world
wide web operation; the URL is:

http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~aatseel/

(Bears repeating often.)

Another thing we'd like to do in connection with this upgrading of
AATSEEL's electronic operation is reconfigure SEELangs a bit. It is
currently housed at CUNY not because it has to be there, but because that
is where it was started by Robert Whitaker. It is overseen by Alex Rudd,
who took it on because nobody else would and because he is interested in
our part of the world. However, he's gone on to do other things, while
continuing his oversight of SEELangs on the side. Although he doesn't
complain, he has mentioned that he wouldn't mind (!) being relieved of this
obligation.

So now is perhaps a good time to consider this issue and see if a qualified
volunteer steps forward. In order to oversee SEELangs under an unmoderated
arrangement like the present one, under listserv, as at CUNY, or under
Majordomo (which is what I'd use if I were to do it), I'd guess it would
require some hours of start-up learning (all the relevant
listserv/majordomo commands), and then a couple of hours a week overseeing
it. Perhaps Alex can be more specific, but I'd say the major task is
dealing with questions from users who don't know how it works, can't
retrieve files, or whatever.

If we move to a moderated list, then it will lose some of its spontaneity,
but there will be no spamming (advertising to a degree beyond the desires
of most list subscribers), and no accidental mispostings like mine or
others we all remember. There are a couple of options as to how this could
be organized. Either messages could continue to be posted as before,
individually, but they would have to pass through the moderator, who would
either approve them and let them go out, or they could be organized into
digests, e.g., a single daily SEELangs mailing. The latter has the
advantage that the moderator simply has to look at all SEELangs postings
once or twice a day and bundle them together, reposting them all at once;
but it has the disadvantage that spontaneity is reduced even further, since
it may be a day before an initial posting is sent out, then another day
before a reply can be posted. The former option would require a moderator
who is at his/her computer a large percentage of the day, checks the mail
often, and has the mental flexibility to spend a couple of minutes dealing
with a message, and then go back to what s/he was doing before checking
mail.

Aside from the mainframe-based listserv and majordomo options, there's also
"Macjordomo" (HORRIBLE name!), which is a Mac-based imitation of Majordomo.
You have a list of subscribers as a file on your desktop Mac, and you have
a variety of options about how people subscribe, how messages are posted,
and so forth. I have used this for mailings for the Formal Approaches to
Slavic Linguistics V conference we are organizing at Wabash College and IU,
and it works fine, although it's not quite as intuitive as I would wish.
However, it is not fast, and would be appropriate only for a Mac hardwired
to the internet via Ethernet or the like. For me to send a two-screen call
for papers to a list of about 500 people (a little larger than the SEELangs
list) took 13 minutes over a 14.4K baud modem via PPP connection. This was
tolerable on a one-time basis, but would be a pain several times a day. It
does work in the background, and I guess would take a couple of minutes of
background work to handle a similar list via ethernet.

I suggest that SEELangers might want to talk on list about whether
moderation is necessary and/or desirable. Under either scenario, I think we
ought to have a new "listowner", or "moderator" if we go in that direction.


If anybody would like to oversee SEELangs, either as listowner in an
unmoderated version or as a more deeply involved moderator, please get in
touch with either myself (address below) or George Mitrevski
(mitrege at mail.auburn.edu).

As my contribution to the discussion, let me say that I think that in any
future incarnation of SEELangs, we should eliminate the files stored under
listserv, as it is not obvious how to retrieve them, and replace them with
files stored at the AATSEEL web site. This makes the SEELangs-master's job
even easier. Files include such things as archived back sets of SEELangs
postings and various AATSEEL-related files.

George Fowler

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