The Great Google debate continues....

Hey anti-equal-dodecaphonic-cadets,

Here's what I propose for now:

A few people have proposed staying at Yahoo, a few people have an ambivalent
attitude, a few people are ok with Google, and a few are proposing private
alternatives (i.e. Robert's BBS script thingy).

What I suggest we do is *at least* give Google a try by cross-posting for at
least a week. It's different, but its cleaner and faster, and the delivery is
*much* faster. I also like that topics are threaded. (Its clear that I much
prefer it to Yahoo by now, eh?)

Joseph, the link thing sounds weird, but you're in and approved, so why not
send a test post to be satisfied that it works for you.

To speed things along, and so no-one here has to wait to be reviewed for
membership over at Google, I'm making it temporarily that anyone can join.
I can then weed out spammers later.

This will get the ball rolling on comparisons. By all means, cross-post to
Google, go there and compare searchability, web interface, etc. Right now a
healthy, core group of 14 of us have registered, and I'll send another email
out inviting members of MMM that I have record of who aren't already joined
to do so.

We need to give it chance. Well, at least I feel that strongly that Yahoo
sucks because of its 'search lameness'.

Robert, as for the proprietary script, I think the BBS certainly looks nice,
etc. But do they have Linux scripts? And I'm still not quite sure I want to
pay dough to be able to chat with you all about music/tuning. My vote would
still be to stay at Yahoo over that, lame as it is.

I've been using to much free good quality software on a killer free OS to take
seriously the idea of paying for software much anymore.

Anyway, if enough of you are just not into Google, I'm going to still keep it
open, try to develop it over there, and maybe there will be two organic forks
of the same idea? But for now, my practice will be to cross-post. I'm certain
that if you give it a chance, even the skeptics will see the virtues of
Google and let the Yahoo group die by slow habitual migration over to Google.
Once enough of you are caught in my web, I'll remove the cross-posts, and
you'll be caught in the horrible Google lair !!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA !!!!! (evil
music full of 7/5 tritones swells as Aaron eats the heads off of little baby
mice)

Best,
Aaron Krister Johnson
http://www.dividebypi.com
http://www.akjmusic.com

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Aaron K. Johnson"
<akjmicro@c...> wrote:

> What I suggest we do is *at least* give Google a try by
cross-posting for at
> least a week.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/non12comp

Hi Aaron,

I've replied to this on metatuning
but just saw that you posted it here
on MMM as well.

I'll be sure to keep this on topic and
only talk about MMM and I'll cc
it to metatuning.

I agree that the Google one is nice and
many nice features. It saves us the
trouble of setting up such a forum
oneself, and in some ways
it is better than many of the scripts you
can find to do it yourself,
particularly the attachments
upload - that is a fairly rare
feature, also the innovative
threading interface.

The one big caveat is that there is
nothing to stop them from changing
the format of the forum any day,
or to add obtrusive ads or whatever
they like, including also just
losing one of the groups entirely too
one day.

All those things have happened with
Yahoogroups which originally
had no ads at all on the web
pages, only a few years ago.
They also changed the format
so that ascii diagrams became
unreadable - luckily we found
a work around, but there is no
guarantee that one will always
find a work around and if one can't
you can't do anytinng about it.
Maybe ascii diagrams aren't
so important here but
they could change things
that are important to us too.
Then also you hear about
yahoogroup groups suddenly
vanishing as happened to the
main tuning list for a few days
- but luckily it came back
again after the glitch.
There was no-one wwe could contact
to find out what was happening,
just had to wait and hope it
got sorted out.

As a free service you just don't
expect good custom support
- though admittedly I haven't
tried the Google custom support
and maybe it is better than
Yahoogroups.

If we host our own script somewhere
whether privately or at an institution
then it will never change unless
we want it to. If one needs
to migrate to a new server,
you can take the script and
messages archives with you.

Anyway with MMM just want us to be
aware of that. Maybe it isn't
such a big issue as if that
happens we can just move on again.
If it can be our home for a couple
of years or whatever, then if we have
to move again we can maybe
find somewhere even better
by then, or host our own
script at that point.

It doesn't seem to matter too
much at all to lose the continuity
with previous messages in this
forum as we have already migrated
twice before. The music is the
central thing and old
messages refer to music that is
no longer available for download
anyway.

Robert