Foot.ie Mailing List

[dahamsta]

Just wondering if there's any demand for a Foot.ie mailing list to compliment the forums?

adam

[James]

might be an idea
get all the breaking news / main topics of debate
put 4 or 5 links in the mail to the relevant topics on the boards and mail it out to the kids out there.

[dahamsta]

Sorry, I should have been clearer: I meant a discussion mailing list. There's certainly scope for a broadcast list later, but we don't really have the information for it at the moment.

adam

[James]

oh ok one of those thingy's
naa wudnt say the need was there to be honest
wud have thought the broadcast thing was more of a runner tbh
wud get the kids that might 'forget' bout the place to log-in and use the site more regularly like. esp once the news thingy is green lighted, u check you mail, get the daily breaking news with the relevant links around the net/ foot.ie site.

hey bingo - foot.ie ya one stop shop for el news

[Dodge]

The old Ir-Soc list used to be very active. I'd be interested and you tend to get a better quality of discussion (lack of anonymity I suppose)

Also a fair amount of people have e-mail access in work but no internet access, I'm sure they'd love the chance to spout opinions like the rest of us

[pete]

Wouldn't a discussion list just be a replacement for the actual forum?

Personally i wouldn't use my work addy on any discussion list & would be a lot slower to check internet mail a/c than visit the forum.

[dahamsta]

Originally posted by pete
Wouldn't a discussion list just be a replacement for the actual forum?

Nope, more of an alternative and/or compliment. My experience with interactive stuff is that a certain proportion of people prefer mailing lists to web forums, mainly because they enable more productive use of bandwidth (you're not downloading the interface) and more immediate discussions (posts are pushed to your mailbox, rather than pulled from a webserver). They also tend to foster more open discussion, although that can work against you too.

Most people would be surprised by the amount of discussion that still goes on on mailing lists. I'm subscribed to about two dozen discussion lists, at least half of which have regular daily traffic, and a quarter with dozens of messages each day. Most of these are tech lists, and technology tends to have a higher proportion of users that prefer mailing lists, but a few of them are less formal and people still seem to enjoy using them as an alternative or compliment to other types of discussion.

My only major concern with operating a footie discussion list would be that we would run a pretty high risk of losing the quality of discussion we try to promote on the web forums. We could get around that by making it a moderated list, but moderated lists require dedicated moderators to deal with abuse and keep the traffic flowing. If you don't have effective moderators, people rapidly get ticked off with posts not appearing, slow discussion rates and unexplained deletions.

The ultimate has always been a link between web and email discussions, but unfortunately this isn't possible without hooks in the underlying web discussion software, and unfortunately vBulletin currently doesn't have those hooks. Maybe in vB3. Right now though I'm just trying to guage interest. If ten or twenty people want it, I'll set it up; if not obviously I won't bother. Actually I'm getting a deja vu right now, I think I may have asked about this before.

adam

[A face]

I used two of them before, one was crap and the other .... after the novelty wore off, was in short crap as well .... wont be using it anyhoo