Re: Important: Do we want to move this list??!!

In-Reply-To: <002d01c1da24$cf9c7660$9e9069d5@e0b9e6>
Robert Walker wrote:

> It is possible for a commercial thing like Yahoogroups to just stop
> doing what it is doing - this happened last year with One List, which
> was a large list provider with many lists on it - they just closed up
> with a few months notice or so and then those who weren't prepared to
> migrate their lists to a paying service lost all their posts in the
> on-line archives.

Say what? OneList is the company that mutated into eGroups and then Yahoo
Groups.

> I'd say symptoms don't look that good at present with all the things
> they seem to be doing to try and get some revenue from it - unless they
> can figure out some way of earning from it while keeping it free and
> not causing too much hassle in the way of advertisements
> - one can understand their dilemma ! Naturally it will be because of the
> large drop recently, last year, in the amount advertisers are willing
> to pay to host an advert on a web site (was it ten-fold,
> or hundred-fold??).

Not only the fall in advertising revenues, but the evaporation of the .com
boom. When advertising was expensive, web sites were allowed to borrow
huge sums of money to establish market share. They're now expected to be
showing a profit -- exactly when they should be borrowing to get over the
bad times.

> Just one thing to consider - for the long term, perhaps many years
> ahead.
> Universities and colleges don't close down often, but they do
> sometimes change their policies. But then so do commercial sites
> and they are perhaps more volatile being dependent on advertising.

Yes, the list had to move from Mills because of a policy change. That
wasn't a problem. We can do it again.

> We can migrate whenever needed, and I don't see it is of any great
> significance where we actually post to. Having unlimited files
> area will be great!

One thing not mentioned yet is that Yahoo claim a non-transferable
copyright on the archives. That means they can only be salvaged by your
opt-in method (as the copyright is also non-exclusive). An alternative
provider might allow some sensible right to re-distribute. Usenet
effectively works like this (although there's no explicit license) which
is why Google can run the archive, but you can still stop somebody quoting
large chunks of your posts in a book (probably). The longer our posts
accumulate in an archive without this flexibility, the more we'll lose if
something does go wrong. I don't know what Columbia's policy is.

Graham