Re: Solicitations

On Jan 4, 2004, at 7:32 AM, Glenn Grigg wrote:
Now that John Jones has made an appeal for funds to help with the hosting
costs of this private forum, it might be time for AIS to finally establish an
"official" forum for members and pay the operating costs as a service to it's
members. As many of you are aware several other flower interest groups already
have official forums. Now is the time for AIS to take some leadership and
expand on its' us-mail only forums.
Umm, not to be picky, but this is a public forum. Anyone can join and post to it.

I have several problems with AIS sponsoring a forum such as this. (And no, it is not a proprietership thing)

Why would we want to restrict membership to just AIS members? Of course, one could say that the AIS charter is to promote interest in irises to the general public, and I would agree with that, so the forum should be open to anyone. Then AIS would have some responsibility for monitoring the list and restricting the activities of those that would abuse the list. I can tell you, that would make the AIS legal folk shudder. If AIS were to sponsor a list, would that imply that it agreed with everything posted on the list? I can tell you that I have seen posts on this list and others that were absolutely incorrect.

However, there are several other iris forums as well, so would having an official AIS list significantly improve things? The lists have been free to all users.

I am not promoting AIS taking over this forum.

Iris-talk (iris@hort.net) will stand or fall on its own. It has its advantages and disadvantages. The Garden forum manages threads differently, but you can easily view threads during a particular month in the archives. (it is the default ordering in the archives). Our archives contain the whole database of all messages ever posted to iris-talk, I think the Gardenweb only maintains messages for about 6 months. Viewing messages in the archive means that you only download (and then only temporarily) those messages that you want to read. And they are always there to go back to.


John | "There be dragons here"
| Annotation used by ancient cartographers
| to indicate the edge of the known world.

List owner iris@hort.net and iris-photos@yahoogroups.com
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