There has been a lot of discussion and concern about the new communities on my.ptg.org. One factor to consider is that Pianotech and CAUT are not the entire operation of PTG, although they may be the most valuable to those of you here. Allen Gilreath has announced that we will keep the listserv versions of these lists running for a while. There was some very valid criticism of the function of my.ptg.org for these lists. What you may not be considering is that this software interfaces with the member database at www.ptg.org. Most forum software doesn't let you do that. We are able to set up communities for all the committees and chapters. I really like the idea that as a committee member I automatically see my committees group and have a place to communicate with the other members and share documents. There is even the possibility of creating microsite web sites for certain groups that may need more. This will allow a new person coming on a committee to have access to the discussion and documents that have been used by that committee. That is not so easy to do with an email only format. We will keep the listserv versions going and we will see if we can find the appropriate forum software that can work seamlessly with the email version. We have done some experiments with this in the past and that may be a good solution for these lists. That doesn't seem to be possible with the my.ptg.org software and email. There is a good reason for this. There was a comment that email listservs are zero admin. That misses the mark. Email lists are very prone to spam and we filter up to 40,000 messages a WEEK. The lists that are contacts for committees and groups are managed but a weekly administrator. There is a team who trade off weeks monitoring mail that gets held. The lists are set so that only subscribers to the list can post, so anything else gets held. Also if you send a message to a group of people and include one of our lists, that message is held because “Too Many Recipients” is another mark of spam. The weekly administrator goes through the held messages and finds the valid ones and deletes the others. This is an important and necessary part of running an email list serve. My.ptg.org works differently by require anyone posting to be logged in an authenticated. That is why even non-member have to set up a profile and log in. This is a different and equally valid way of limiting spam. This therefore requires posting to be done from a web interface. This poses the biggest problem for mobile phones unless they are rather smart. This is why my.ptg.org does not accept posts directly from email. I think one of the reasons people like the email format, besides the performance issues is that you can then configure any email client you want however you want it. The web forum gives you a prescribed view of the data. I have found that by setting the notifications to TEXT and PDA, I get a more concise view in email without all the fancy stuff around it. You just have to remember to respond using the links at the bottom of the email rather than using the email program's reply. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ronald Berry Piano Service Indianapolis, IN 317-255-8213 ron at berrypiano.com http://www.berrypiano.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ask me about Healthy Chocolate! http://www.berrygoodchocolate.com Public Key http://www.berrypiano.com/key/Ron_Berry.txt -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20110310/2623a468/attachment.htm>
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