Cave-Surveying Digest, Vol 49, Issue 1

[Jonny Prouty]

Hello all,

For what it's worth, I appreciate the existence of this list, and why it
exists in theory. I do wish there was more discussion here, but I guess I'm
as much to blame as anyone, I certainly haven't promoted it.

In regards to moving the functionality of this list over to discord, I'm on
a few discord servers on which cave surveying is occasionally discussed. I
would imagine that the admin associated with managing a discord server is
at least as labor intensive as managing this mailing list. The signal to
noise ratio on discord also seems to be exceedingly low, imho. That is my
main complaint about it, it's just too much effort to find the interesting
bits of information.

I wouldn't be opposed to trying to promote this mailing list amongst the
folks I cave with. In a perfect world, how would you all like to see this
list best used?

Sincerely,
Jonny


P.S. Please excuse my brevity, I am corresponding from my phone.

On Thu, Sep 28, 2023, 21:27 Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 28, 2023 at 01:12:54PM +0000, Graham Mullan wrote:
> > How many subscribers are there?
>
> There are 197 addresses, but a significant proportion are set to
> "nomail", which is typically because they are no longer valid and
> bounce mail which the list software handles by marking them as
> "nomail".  Users can also set "nomail" though, e.g. if they
> want to be able to post from different addresses without getting
> the list mail to each one, or if maybe if they want to pause
> the list while away or busy.  The list software now tracks why
> "nomail" was set but for older cases it doesn't know, and the
> list has existed for a long time so that's the case for many "nomail"
> settings.
>
> I can't see how to exactly count the nomail addresses, but from
> a quick scan through it looks to be maybe 1/4 to 1/3.  There are
> probably more dead addresses though as until today the list hasn't had
> enough traffic for ages to trigger enough bounces to detect them -
> I suspect we'll have a flurry of that in the next few days.
>
> There may also be a few cases of one person subscribed from multiple
> addresses, and some addresses may be no longer valid but configured
> to just swallow mail instead of bouncing it.
>
> So I'd guess 100-140 people who will actually see messages is probably a
> realistic figure.
>
> > Is it likely that new subscribers can be found?
>
> Maybe people not knowing about the list is the issue, but Wookey has
> tried to promote it.  That caused little bursts of new subscribers
> but hasn't translated into the list being used more.
>
> If the list is actually useful and being used (and for discussion
> for which there isn't a better existing other list) then I'm OK with
> doing the admin, but the list probably sees fewer real messages in one
> *year* than spam messages in the admin queue in one *week*.
>
> Cheers,
>     Olly
>
> --
> Cave-Surveying https://lists.survex.com/mailman/listinfo/cave-surveying
>
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