Thanks for the update, Marko.
So people don't like having to put a piece of paper
into the mailbox with two stamps on it -- okay. One
benefit of that subscription process is that it would
cut way down on the "hit and run" kids whose
bulletin-board postings about their great range are
annoying certain listers (and I don't think it's "pop"
singers that are irritating people, but "non-serious"
ones, who would be eliminated if there were a
subscription process that involved more than a button
click -- it's really not a big deal to stick something
in the mail, but if your only motivation for posting
is to say, "I'm the next Britney" once, you probably
won't do it).
But, I'll bend to the groove. Now that we know Marko
is willing and working on it, perhaps the best
solution is to make one last plea for voluntary
donations to get the list up and running again for a
while, and then hope that Marko's plan to turn
Vocalist into a *private* commercial site ends up
taking care of funding for ever after.
Here's another vote against staying on egroups: These
sites may change their policies at any moment. For
right now, your personal information and email
addresses are supposed to be kept private, and for
now, the advertising is minimal -- but that's not a
sure bet. Anyone who used to be part of Remarq, a
free newsgroup posting/reading service like Deja,
knows that one day a couple of weeks ago the service
was suddenly shut down to those without a credit card
-- another company bought Remarq and is continuing the
service for people who pay for it.
If we bank on our list here, with all our archives and
links and the master list of members, and it suddenly
goes the way of Remarq, everything would be lost. Or
if egroups changes policy and starts spamming its
members. Or if it folds. At least our own domain
name is under our control, not some big corporation
trying to turn a profit.
Plus, more singers find Vocalist.org than think about
searching through egroups for a singing group -- our
list pool here, only about half of the original
vocalist group, is missing out on the influx of new
voices that we used to get with the Vocalist. By
virtue of being stand-alone and available to the big
search engines, Vocalist.org's pool was bigger. Yes,
there are some young kids who join and then leave
after a week, but would any of us have found the
Vocalist if it had been hidden away in some commercial
cluster of mailing lists?
Isabelle B.
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Isabelle Bracamonte
San Francisco, CA
ibracamonte@y...
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