North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@bellsouth.net>]

On 12/20/2011 1:16 PM, Ginda Fisher wrote:

> If the goal is to restrict membership on this list to paid-up members

NAFEX needs to do that on their own forum somewhere else.

> of NAFEX, I believe that can be done on ibiblio. This appears to be
> an ordinary "mailman" mailing list. I have administered other mailman
> lists, and the list owner can screen members before allowing them to
> join, and can remove members at any time.

This can be done but I would never consider doing that with this list.
This mode of operation would take a lot of time and work that I can not 
make available for this purpose.

> I personally think it would
> be unwise to do that, but (Lawrence, correctme if I am wrong) that
> can be done without making any real changes to the list.

I agree that it would be very unwise to do that and that it could ruin 
this forum, which is one of the best of its kind anywhere. It can take a 
long time to build a significant forum user base, community, daily 
traffic and archives containing valuable content. This is not done 
overnight.

A big difference between this list and NAFEX's forum is that theirs is 
private and content cannot be searched by Google whereas this one is 
public and elaborate Google searches can be performed on the extensive 
archives.

NAFEX could install forum software (maybe SMF Forums) that offers users 
several participation options, posting and reading online as well as 
posting and reading by email. Forum software that can create browseable 
and even downloadable monthly archives might be available too. If they 
use a hosting service for nafex.org that offers a mailman mailing list 
then they can simply download all the archives from this list and import 
them into their own and have everything that has been posted to the 
Nafex forum from its beginning. They could also subscribe a remailer 
email address for their list to this list and port, one way, all posts 
into theirs on an ongoing basis, setting the delivery mode for that ID 
to nomail to avoid endless loops - maybe too risky.
I feel that the members of this list should be consulted before pursuing 
these options. Of course, there would be many posts from non NAFEX 
members in the traffic and in the archives. Just a thought.

LL