SEELANGS, R.I.P?

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Eliot Borenstein wrote:

> Thanks to everyone for their thoughtful responses to my original
> post. Let me make a few clarifications:
>
> 1) Of course SEELANGS is a valuable resource. That's why so many
> people subscribe. My point is that it could be a better resource if
> it were using a different vehicle.

Tastes differ; I'm happy here.

> 2) Multiple constituencies. One poster asked why the Pussy Riot
> discussion was "allowed." This is an unmoderated list--everything is
> allowed. That's all to the good, but why not have a medium that makes
> it easier to filter out the noise from the signal?

My email program makes it easy to create and manage filters, even ad hoc 
ones for particular threads. For example, none of my SEELANGS traffic 
ends up in my Inbox, it's all filtered directly to a SEELANGS folder. If 
there's a lot of SEELANGS traffic on a boring or distasteful topic, it's 
a trivial matter for me to select those 12 messages (or whatever) and 
delete them with one key-press because they're not commingled with all 
the hundreds of other emails I get in a day.

> 3) Multimedia. Many of our posts are hyperlinks, some of which get
> garbled when they're put on the list. A different platform could
> change the way we deal with multimedia links. Instead of a link to a
> youtube video with a Putin parody, for instance, the video itself
> could be embedded (Facebook has been doing this for years).

Not everyone knows how to pirate a YouTube video to another website 
(from what I can tell, this group is less computer-savvy than some other 
fora I visit, probably because of its older demographic). BTW, videos 
that appear to be embedded on Facebook are not actually there. What you 
see is still hosted on YouTube, but through the magic of HTML, it 
/appears/ to be on Facebook. And believe it or not, the technical term 
for this is "embedding."

> 4) Cyrillic. Once of the refreshing things about the Pussy Riot
> exchange was that that this was (I think) the first extended debate
> on SEELANGS that took place almost entirely in Russian. Remarkably,
> it worked. But even now, I still see the occasional post that was
> presumably Cyrillic, but ends up as gibberish. Shouldn't a forum for
> all things Slavic have a seamless way of handling the Cyrillic
> alphabet(s)?

On this we agree, but I'm not convinced that SEELANGS is at fault. 
Rather, I think certain posters haven't mastered their email programs 
and type in Cyrillic but then send in other encodings.

> 5) The digest format as an alternative. I've been getting the digest
>  format for years. It's better for me than receiving individual
> posts, but it's still ridiculously clunky. For example, I was reading
> this last set of posts in a digest on my phone. At least one of the
> posts included all the previous posts, in multiple copies because of
> multiple embedding. This is laborious on a small screen. I realize
> that reading the digest that way is my choice, but I doubt I'm the
> only one opting to read on a smartphone. In 2012, why should our
> means of communication be optimized only for a desktop or laptop
> computer screen?

I'm sorry if you choose to drink beer from a shot glass, but that's your 
own decision.

As smartphone technology advances, programmers will devise ways for the 
phone to optimize the incoming material. The original concept of HTML, 
remember, was that the designer would give basic instructions that would 
be interpreted in various appropriate ways on various devices. By the 
same token, your correspondents shouldn't have to reformat their 
messages as they try to guess what device you're using.

> My proposal was to "kill" SEELANGS as it presently exists, but only
> by replacing it with something that could perhaps serve us all
> better. When SEELANGS was established, there was no World-Wide Web,
> and many of its subscribers were reading the posting as ASCII text on
> PINE. (If you don't know what PINE was, consider yourself lucky.) Of
> course it's not a tragedy to have to scroll through multiple
> embeddings, and I can live with it if I have to. But one of the main
> features of the evolution of digital communication in the past two
> decades has been increased convenience. Why can't we take advantage
> of that?

There are two common solutions to that:

1) Members of the forum cooperate by pruning material not directly 
relevant to their response. I personally prefer this approach.

2) Members of the forum agree to top-post, so the reader need not scroll 
through previous messages to get to the new material. I personally 
dislike this approach, but YMMV.

A less-common solution is the one employed by one of my correspondents 
-- she has her email program set to hide all quoted material. I 
personally find this aggravating because if I intersperse my comments as 
I have done here, the program hides my comments as well, and she asks 
why I sent a blank message.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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