RE: Replacing Yahoo with a paid provider was Posting et

["Keith Doxey" <ukha@xxxxxxx>]

Hi All

Just to add my comments to this....

1. True - Yahoo isnt perfect and the adverts are annoying but the features
offered are very useful.

2. Other Groups - I set up KAT5-Users to "try" to remove some of
the traffic
>from
peoples overall schema of Home Automation. Likewise HomeVision still gets
frequently discussed here despite the existance of HomeVision-Users.

3. <TONGUE-IN-CHEEK MODE>
I propose the creation of the following groups...

UKHA_Cheesy_Chips
UKHA_Totally_OT
UKHA_Slightly_OT
UKHA_I_Dont_Want_To_Read_This_Thread

</TONGUE-IN-CHEEK MODE>

We have been down this route sooo many times and always come back to the
same point.

The Yahoo Web interface is far from perfect but it does allow you to read
the list when you cant access your mail. You can choose to have individual
or Daily digest emails.

Yes, there is a lot of OT stuff but often of interest to several otherwise
the thread would rapidly die.

Yes, some posts are overly long due to lack of trimming, but we are all
guilty of this at times.

This is NOT just a mailing list, this IS the UKHA Community where we are
all
friendly (most of the time anyway!).

With (currently) only a few hundred people sharing this obsession with Home
Automation, this is the ideal way for us to communicate and has led to many
face to face meetings.

Yes, there are times when some threads should be taken to private email and
I believe this does happen but how can we tell unless we are personally
involved in the off list discussion.

The UKHA IRC channel is another means of communication but it is of little
use to me as I cannot access it unless I am at home by which time it is
often quite late in the evening. On the occasions when I used to try using
it there were few if any people online at that time although I believe is
can be quite busy during the day.

As I said at the start of this reply, YAHOO is not perfect, but I dont
believe any single medium could ever be. For a free service that is
available the majority of the time it is hard to beat. Finding a paid
service would not be that easy as has been pointed out by recent threads on
Web Hosting and my own experiences shortly before Christmas when FXHost
went
"titsup.com" and all my websites and email were lost.

Paid hosting comes in two formats

Inexpensive  - limited capacity, limited relilability, flakey or
non-existant support
Expensive - Total Reliability, guaranteed service levels and 24/7/365
support.

As has already been pointed out, how many people would actually stump up
cash to fund a paid for service. How many newcomers would be deterred from
joining because of a fee ?

The current arrangements suit me at this point in time.

My vote is currently "NO CHANGE"

Keith




-----Original Message-----
From: BUTLER, Tony, FM [mailto:Tony.BUTLER@xxxxxxx]

> As far as the "on-topic/off-topic" discusion regarding the
> fujitsu pads, looking at the Forum that was set up, most
> people are using the units as some form of controller,
> which I think (please someone correct me if Im mistaken)
> falls within HA.

I would agree with this.

>So maybe as an immediate solution, we could set up one secondary list
>(ukha_overflow) which could be used to farm out things like the Web Pad
>fever. This new list would remain open always but not dedicated to one
>subject or another, merely an overflow system for ukha_d to take the
brunt
>of subjects which threaten to overpower the list.

If a secondary list is set up then it's just going to end up with all the
problems - this doesn't solve anything.

If ePods/Fujitsu's etc to control a HA environment isn't on topic, I don't
know what is!
What would be discussed in this list if not such things?
The idea of setting up a spin-off group as has now been done with the
Fujitsu's seems to be a workable solution - as has already been stated
elsewhere, these would 'naturally die' when the frenzy is over & fold
back
into the main ukha_d group.

Tony