VMs: Re: Yahoo -- VMs -- New mailing list address -- possibly short-term

["John Grove" <John@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Colour me confused once again... but, couldn't we just build our very own
bulletin board with our own membership sign in and not use Yahoo? Any
webhost out there provides enough space to run a board and there are enough
free cgi scripts to build a simple or not-so-simple board. The question
isn't whether we need to be housed on some commercial enterprise that
flashes ads at you - it's do we want all our conversations exposed to the
whole world and searchable by google...
For that matter, we could exclude the webpages of the webboard from being
indexed by robots etc and nobody could ever find us...

Do we want to be able to view the pages in HTML or do we prefer to use email
because we like to download the files from our server onto our computer for
later viewing in a text only format? If you haven't guessed yet, I'm
starting to convince myself that a webboard is a better solution to an
active discussion group. It can be controlled for reading/writing/searching
as required. And it can display in various fonts on various operating
systems and browsers....

I don't see what the fear of javascript could be -- It's quite a helpful
scripting language for making the pages do lots of magical things [and it's
completely harmless (cookie-abuse market tracking aside)].

John.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jacques Guy" <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Voynich Ms. mailing list" <voynich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, March 09, 2002 5:50 AM
Subject: VMs: Re: Yahoo -- VMs -- New mailing list address -- possibly
short-term


> Just yesterday I stumbled across a Yahoo discussion
> group (or whatever they call themselves) about
> Easter Island. I wanted to post an answer to a
> question put there, but I had to register.
>
> After an hour of effort, I gave up in disgust.
>
> First, I had to give my country of origin and
> my postcode. No business of yours, folks, so
> I clicked on the first country in the list
> (USA) and entered 123456 as postcode. The wretched
> thing complained that it was not a valid postcode.
> My curiosity awakened, I tried Bangladesh. Same
> story. Mind you, had I wanted to try France, it
> was not on the list displayed (but Thailand was),
> I would have had to enable JavaScript first,
> then click on the link to more countries.
>
> Then I was asked my sex. It complained when
> I left it out.
>
> Then my occupation. Thankfully, there was "other".
>
> Then my title. It complained when I left it
> unanswered.
>
> Then... I forgot.
>
> Finally, I had to choose a member ID. Now there are less
> than 200 people on that list, so I was surprised when
> all the IDs I tried were knocked back: already
> attributed. TeHaha, TeRoro to start with. Then
> I got sick of my Polynesian names being rejected,
> and I used some names I had made for myself when
> playing Ultima VII. Kaa. Already taken. Tskaa.
> Already taken (what???? yes.). Into Japanese now.
> Tsurezuregusa. You've guessed: already taken.
>
> It was clear by then that your proposed user name
> was matched against all the members of _all_ their
> lists.
>
> When you add to that the ads which apparently come
> gracing your mailbox... count me out.
>
>
>