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Our electronic bulletin board service (BBS),
Sacra Bytes, has been our group’s main source of electronic communication for nearly seven
years now. During most of those seven years,
Sacra Bytes
was the group’s only electronic communications source. By the way, I’m not
sure how many of you remember that our new vice president, Diana DeMuth, named
our BBS back in 1993. But I digress.
Back in the heyday of our BBS (1993-1994) we enjoyed well over 6,000 calls to
the system per month (averaging over 200 calls per day). Last year that figure
shrunk to fewer than 2,000 calls per month (averaging around 59 calls per day).
Today we see about 500 calls per month (averaging about 15 calls per day). What
this means to us is that the BBS is currently serving a handful of members who
call regularly and a slightly larger handful of non-members who cruise by to
check us out (or simply to test their modems).
There are many reasons for this decline in calls to
Sacra Bytes. The fact that today we have less than half the members than we had in 1993 is
one reason. The Internet, of course, has played a large role in dictating where
many users go for electronic information. All of that aside, there is now
little doubt that the $100 per month currently spent to keep
Sacra Bytes
operating could be better spent elsewhere within our group. The Steering
Committee is currently investigating the issue in detail. Your attendance and
input at the Steering Committee would be most welcome.
More Options
Recently, Robert DuGaue, owner of CalWeb Communications, offered to provide our
group with an e-mail discussion list to enhance our electronic communications.
Actually, CalWeb provides two discussion lists for us. One of the lists is for
the group’s officers and the larger discussion list (sacpcug@calweb.com) is for the general membership. CalWeb does not offer this service to other
customers and is providing the discussion lists to us at no charge. As you may
know, CalWeb hosts our Web page as well. My thanks go to Robert and his fine
staff at CalWeb for all they do for us.
Just before we launched our e-mail discussion list, webmaster Dave Eden started
a “club” for our group on the Yahoo Web site. If you have full Internet
browsing capabilities, the Yahoo club offers some interesting features,
including a calendar, chat room, and messaging area. The down side is that we
have no control over the club. The Yahoo club has attracted only 46 members
since Dave founded it in September 1998. Though we’ve advertised the Yahoo club
at the general meeting, in the newsletter, and on our Web page, it doesn’t seem
to be the communications tool it could be for us.
With three electronic communications tools available to members—the BBS,
discussion list, and Yahoo club—it’s no wonder that members are confused about
where to go for help online. As a member who enjoys answering questions for
members online, it’s burdensome for me to check with three different electronic
services. It makes more sense to me to have one electronic communications
service that members can access easily.
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A committee comprised of Larry Clark, Don Frieze,
Ken Hopkins, Milt Hull, and myself are looking at the communication options
available to us. If you have any suggestions, please contact one of us or,
better yet, come to the next Steering Committee meeting and get involved.
New Discussion List Instructions
Due to a learning curve and some technical changes within CalWeb, the
information published here last month is not completely correct this month.
(Don’t you just love it?) Hopefully the information you get here will be valid
for more than one month.
In order to subscribe to the group’s discussion list, please send a message to
listar@calweb.com. Leave the subject line blank. The very first line of the message must read:
subscribe sacpcug percy@fuddlemyer.com
Of course, you need to replace the percy@fuddlemyer.com address with your own
address. You may add the word end on the second line of the message. Adding end
to the message will force the Listar program to stop processing commands in the
message. Thus, the body of the message might look like this:
subscribe sacpcug percy@fuddlemyer.com
end
Within a very short period of time after sending the “subscribe” message,
CalWeb’s Listar program will send you a verification message by the Listar
program. Once you have received that verification message you can consider
yourself a member of the discussion list. To participate in the discussion
list, you’ll need to send messages to
sacpcug@calweb.com. When doing so please add a subject line that briefly describes the content of
your message. This is good online etiquette.
Have Problems?
Ian Justman, the postmaster at CalWeb, has taken responsibility for our
discussion list, and I administer the list remotely. Ian and I have made the
discussion list to default to the digest version for everyone who subscribes.
This configuration saves those who subscribe the hassle of seemingly complex
commands they would otherwise have to send to Listar. If you do not prefer to
have the digest version of the discussion list, please contact me.
Also, for you Microsoft Outlook users, upon sending the “subscribe” message to
the Listar discussion list you may notice in the reply from Listar a number of
“unknown command” lines and possibly other superfluous lines prior to the lines
in the message informing you that you are a member of the discussion list.
Please disregard these superfluous lines. The problem is that Outlook sends
some header information (even in text mode) that Listar has trouble digesting.
Not to worry. You can ignore those lines in the reply. We’re still working on
how to get Listar to ignore the header information from Outlook. The messages
you will send to the discussion list from then on (after subscribing) will not
have this problem.
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Our president notes that our BBS is getting a lot less traffic, that we have
more options, and has some new discussion list instructions.
