h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The Editorial team are challenging the Community to come up with an alternative to the current method of communicating with our Volunteers. At present we use Yahoo Groups, but we would like to find a better service provider. Any suggestions should be free and include features such as a calendar with the ability to send out reminders, unlimited members and no limits on the size and number of file uploads.

If you think you know of a better service, let us know all about it. Or try it out other people's suggestions and let us know what you think of them. Once the Community has come to a consensus on the best alternative to Yahoo Groups, we will implement the change.

Finally, someone realises that Y! Groups sucks. Guess the Volunteer Pages got too full with people who'd changed their e-mail addresses...

I'll get webcrawling .

This may sound dumb, but didn't you just announce that the next DNA will allow password protected sites? Why not use the software you already have to set up a passworded site for each group?

Peet
(ever lateral)

Mmm. Good idea - I posted yesterday to the aceforum on this very topic. I don't know of another service, though. At least, not for free.

IMHO, something like the free Snitzforums would work, only you'd have to set it up and host it, and it might be difficult to control membership. http://forum.snitz.com/specs.asp

It's far from ideal, though.

Whoami?

what about this http://www.infopop.com/ ? see this BBS company a lot

example http://forum.ud.com/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=1

The current Volunteer system uses E-mail, and a lot of people'd like it to stay that way. As far as I know, BBS are all web-based and therefore unsuitable for those of us who, for example, only have limited WWW access.

I'm still looking...

I thought the volunteers would have to have reasonable access to DNA in order to do what they do...?

True of most, but not all.

what about a dna for volenteer with special password

the idea:
dna/volenteer/ace
dna/volenteer/guru
...

In my case (subediting), I can still read the mailing list when I'm on a nonWWW PC with e-mail. However yes, I do need web access to do actual subediting.

On private DNA: Technology you've already got, skins you've already got, and of course, the ability to store a set of entries as a handbook.

Come on, you know it's worth it. It'd save all the hopping around and, since it'd be accessible whenever h2g2 was, you'd not get the email posts of 'servers down'.

The only thing is titles appearing in our non-private spaces. That's an issue that would have to be addressed - it would need to be completely watertight.

Whoami?

I can see one problem from the staff's point of view against a password protected dna site is that unless the site is 'by invitation only' they would loose a lot of control of who could access the site...

A worst case scenario would be that if a member of one of the volunteer groups was banned from h2g2 would there be a way of stopping them from accessing the volunteer groups under a different login with the same password?

Passwords can be changed...

Meaning that if (for example only) I was to be banned the towers would have to change the password to the scouts, sub-eds and aces groups, over 200 researchers would be cut-off until they got the e-mails informing them of the new password - just imagine the chaos that would cause

Meaning that if (for example only) I was to be banned the towers would have to change the password to the scouts, sub-eds and aces groups, over 200 researchers would be cut-off until they got the e-mails informing them of the new password - just imagine the chaos that would cause.

And, theoretically, every time someone left a volunteer group, even of their own accord, to keep things secure the password would have to be changed and everyone would loose access again

If it works the way I suspect it does, it's not necessary for everyone to have the *same* password; that was only done with the test sites for convenience... (Am I wrong, Jim?)

Which means that when someone leaves, their personal username and password are deleted and everyone else carries on as normal.

When you joined for the first time you would get an e-mail with a password, and you'd probably stick to your DNA username... Or at least, that's how I would see it working. It just seems to be a shame to have spent so much time building this great communications system just to look elsewhere when you actually want to communicate...

Sorry for sounding dim, but what exactly is wrong with using Yahoo Groups? I can't see any problems with the service.

Why not use the BBC's majordomo server (mailing list programme). You can have password protection and e-mails sent to the list will go out to the group. There's also features available for (text) file uploads and daily digests.

The downside is no www front-end.

I mentioned this idea to Mark once but he seemed reluctant to have to go to someone within the BBC to get access to the service.

- I've used majordomo lists in the past and they do work well, the only problem is if people want to read the list on the web.

Alternatively... http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Mailing_Lists/Hosting_Companies/

within DNA would be handy, but the password issue should be go ok as long as every volenteer kept his promiss to not releave the password.

access should not webpage but like beta sites, a pop up window.