[A6] New host?!?

[CikiraMidi at aol.com]

>Keep Yahoo out of it.

>Seconded.


Argg, Michael and Marshall!

Yahoo accounts don't receive spam if a person setting up an account 
("profile") bothers to deselect Preference options for various sorts of contacts from 
them.

They don't force you to open an account to subscribe to a group; you can do 
so directly, bypassing profile-making, but naturally they don't make a big deal 
out of this, any more than they do about opting out of default Preferences 
settings.

Yahoo Groups work slick as a whistle if you know a few things in advance, and 
if there's a group moderator who approves new member subscriptions. This is 
not a big deal, and a group moderated in this way won't have spam. When you 
want to subscribe to a moderated group, you have to write a sentence that tells 
the moderator you're not a spambot. Moderator approves you, and that's all 
"moderation" needs to consist of.

Their ads are indeed intrusive if you try to read messages at the Yahoo site. 
That's why having a Yahoo "dummy" account for email is so important. You 
don't have to make public any info. about yourself, and you can change your email 
mode quickly between individual mails, digest mode and the no-email settings. 
I'm subscribed to 46 (!) Yahoo groups, and switch modes according to what's 
going on of interest to me.

One thing I do for SynthSights' 200+ members is save group digest mails, edit 
out ads and headers, and upload zipped batches of them as text files to the 
group's Files section. If people want to visit the web page and catch up with 
the group, they can bypass Yahoo's messages altogether. As Evil Moderatrix I'm 
gonna help folks beat that damned ad system, whatever it takes. I do that 
every 20 digests, and it's not a lot of work.

SynthSights members have set up a separate info. site. In principle I think 
this is a good idea, in case the group wants to bail on Yahoo at a later time. 
As soon as Yahoo pisses me off, we're outta there. But there's no reason not 
to take advantage of a system that's already in place and can offer a lot of a
dvantages if you work it right.


--Amanda         
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