What the future holds for ASA

[SRyckman <nevets429@xxxxxxxxx>]

As many of the long term ASA members know, newsgroups have many pluses
and minuses.  On the plus side they are very simple and quite easy to
access, if you know how to access.  On the negatives they are seen as
a dying region of the Internet and most Internet newbies don't even
know what a newsgroup is, let alone how to access it.   There is also
no formal moderation in the "alt" newsgroups which makes keeping
things under control difficult.

A brief history of this group:

April 9th, 1989 - Proposal for the Security Conference was posted on
RelayNet, a system of interconnected bulletin board systems. At this
time the conference was only available on Lakes Region BBS in Zion IL
and my own Off The Wall - On The Line bulletin boards in Wadsworth IL.
Both were PCBoard BBS's with two phone lines each.

October 1989 - The Security Conference went live. It had been delayed
due to a maximum capacity of conferences on RelayNet that had to wait
for a software upgrade to be rolled out.

March 24th, 1996 - The proposal message for the alt.security.alarms
newsgroup was posted. All messages were cross posted with RelayNet so
users on either side could see all messages.

October 1996 - The RelayNet system experienced issues with the cross-
posting due to an update in their software. The cross posting never
worked again and the RelayNet conference was abandoned in favor of the
newsgroup as attendance was higher there.

April 9th, 2011 - 22 years after the group was originally formed a new
era begins as a FaceBook page and forum.   The intention is that these
mediums will allow new users access to the expertise of the group.
The FaceBook page isn't designed to serve as a destination but a
launch point into the forum and newsgroup.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/AltSecurityAlarms/201879703167854?sk=info

Those who wish to access the forum directly can do so here:

http://asa.nevets.net

Obviously, this newsgroup will continue to exist and be used, but the
intention is to bring more participation into the group and expand it
into a more widely used collection of resources to reach more people.

Happy 22nd birthday to the group.

Enjoy....