In a message dated 03/02/2001 1:02:33 PM Eastern Standard Time,

<< Look, it's extremely poor form to post private email publicly (and I'm
bowing before the net gods for forgiveness), but I can't have you make
such bold claims without commenting back. When you wrote "But I think
you have little idea of how ISPs charge heavy users, or what a heavy
user is." what choice did I have but to defend by background (or
one-up you as you seem to have taken it. Particularly since my
background is so directly related to the issues with the list.

So, just for the record. I didn't start the game, I merely defended
Johns attack of my knowledge. >>

I'll grant you half a point scored on that one, I'd forgotten about it.

Actually, upon second thought, make it a tenth of a point. Without going
back and finding our emails to quote from, IIRC I'm fairly sure my slight
provocation to you was itself a defensive response to things you had earlier
said. You had been pressing the point that MAPUG was a low-traffic list, or
something to that effect, saying that an average of 2 posts per hour was
trivial, and implying incompetence on my part, with the evidence being some
double posts from such low volume.

In essence you were both issuing a putdown and an oversimplified version of
what causes double posts and what causes a list server to become overloaded
and trigger an ISP to charge more, up to and including demanding a dedicated
server be used. My point was that it's not the number of posts emailed, it
is a function of many things. Many of which scale by the number of
subscribers, number of different ISPs of subscribers, number of subscribers
with piss-poor ISPs, number in other time zones, with less than 24/7
availability, frequency of their changing ISPs without unsubscribing, and so
forth.

As astro lists go, this is a large one. I pointed you to
www.astroarchive.com where you can see we are one of the most prolific,
especially if you eliminate a few ridiculously busy ones where individual
variable-star observations are posted. Either there are tens of thousands of
dedicated variable-star observers, or they are using a mailing list as some
sort of database or archive ;-)

With subscribers in many time zones and a significant number in countries
with poor Internet/telephone/ISP infrastructure, it's often difficult to tell
if someone has abandoned their account or they just have poor availability
for several days. I hate to unsubscribe longtime subscribers in countries
with poor infrastructure, despite the problems their ISPs cause. So up goes
the number of bounces I tolerate, the retries, etc.

You had also expressed the opinion that shore.net was a horrible ISP. In
fact, they've been the list ISP since at least around April, 1996. During
that time, they've been quite nice to deal with, extremely reliable in terms
of availability, and have never lost a file, had an unscheduled interruption
of service, or hassled me over anything. Not even the infinite loop of
out-of-office messages which wasn't their fault ;-)

If you doubt that "unlimited bandwidth" is not truly unlimited, and more
particularly that NO ISP allows lists on a normal account on a shared server
to hog unlimited CPU without consequences, you certainly didn't respond with
a refutation beyond again invoking one-upsmanship and/or advocating moving to
a different ISP or egroups.

You then stated that you knew ISPs where better service could be had at low
cost, but told me you weren't going to divulge that info to me: that I
"should do (my) own research" or something to that effect. A nice touch,
especially considering that it was you, not me, who thought the ISP should be
changed.

This is HARDLY the innocent pursuit of improving MAPUG which you claim as a
motive.

MAPUG will improve technically, but at my pace, not yours. And it will do so
through my own admittedly slow efforts, with perhaps some help from people
who truly are helpful rather than self-congratulatory and judgmental.

As for egroups, I don't want this list cookie-fied, bannered, tag-lined,
copyright-stripped, or whatever else Yahoo might do to egroup lists at will.

As for people unsubscribing from MAPUG, there has been no unusual activity.
People subscribe and unsubscribe all the time, in large numbers. Of course,
not many "Subscribe" requests hit the list, because by definition inept
non-subscribers looking to subscribe can't post, while inept subscribers
looking to unsubscribe, can.

As for the growth of a Meade egroup, it's wonderful if they've gone from 250
to 300 subscribers, or 300 to 350. MAPUG had rather wild growth at that size
also. I hope they make it so painless and efficient that they get 30,000
subscribers, and I hope that MAPUG does not. It would be nice keeping this
list to a dull roar of predominantly on-topic posts by a perfectly nice
number of outstanding individuals who have bonded into an online community
the equal of which many of them claim not to have seen elsewhere.

Admittedly the people on the list are self-selected with a bias toward liking
the list, otherwise they might have left.

I need to thank the list for a private outpouring of support, which have been
100% positive and greater in number than for previous list controversies.
Apparently there are a lot of you out there who had silently thought I was
too lenient previously as opposed to being too Draconian now. A few also
wondered if I'm distraught over this incident. The answer is no, I'm doing
perfectly fine, thank you. I personally would have rather been doing other
things for the last hour or two, such as packing for the eclipse in June,
going to bed (Eastern time), or reading on-topic posts. But a guy's gotta do
what a guy's gotta do.

As usual, I'll request that replies (except the original poster) be directed
privately to me...but in this case some people are apparently itchy to say
something, and others suspect I'm suppressing dissenters from "free speech"
so I'll also open it up for the following, with a strict limit of one post
per subscriber.

1. An unlimited number of negative replies on the list (limit one per
subscriber)
and
2. Up to "10, or double the number of negative replies, whichever is greater"
positive replies (limit one per subscriber)

No debate back and forth, no attacking each other's opinions. Just state
your own opinion once, agreeing or disagreeing with how I run the list, and
why, and that's it.

John

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