Date   : Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:06:32 +0000
From   : samwise@... (samwise)
Subject: Who the message is from...

2009/11/12 Michael Firth <mfirth@...>:

> In the absence of any real decision, I've set up a list anyway, as its
> trivial to do.

> I guess its over to the majority now as to what they want to do...

I'm getting pretty bored with this discussion again, but if we're
going to have a migration do we really want to just split off without
any sort of plan?  There's already been several people in this
discussion who said they'd consider it rather ungrateful and that such
a move runs the risk of splitting the community.  Springing a new list
on ppl isn't going to go down too well, I suspect.

There's already a bunch of early messages missing from the online
archives, if I recall correctly, and I don't think we want to risk
doing that again.  Would it not make sense before we end up with two
competing lists, to:

a) make several concerted efforts to get the current administrator to
take a real interest

b) if there is no satisfaction in that regard, get agreement from a
majority of the regulars that a complete migration is the preferred
option

c) plan such a migration, so that we take a complete copy of the
archive of messages with us and also make sure that the new setup is
the most reliable we can make it, preferably not dependent on one
person.

If we do end up at c), I don't know what kind of kit you've got your
site running on atm, Michael, but several of the well-known beeb sites
are hosted on some decent servers from one of the best ISPs in the
country, which is friendly to our retro interests.  I can easily
arrange a list on there, and that would ensure there'd never be an
issue with bandwidth or disk space etc. and would be regularly and
professionally backed up and maintained.

But I definitely think we have to exhaust a) and get agreement at b)
/before/ we consider risking a split ... what does everyone else
think?

Peter.