I think Jim's covered the pros & cons here. The mailing list probably can't work with an active doubled membership: There will be too many posts, we'd have to go to threaded reading, the "group" aspect would fade. I've already stopped posting stuff about non-math as the group has expanded beyond "friends of Rich & Bill". A few people have dropped out because of the volume, and I suspect a few others have simply stopped reading without bothering to unsubscribe. Bringing in some new people is good, but how to control the numbers? One method is to invite people you know, but this restricts us to old boys & students of same. Another is to hint at the group's existence in print, and make it just a little hard to find. But the Web can't keep a good secret. I can handle a couple of dozen subscribe requests. And I've very occasionally removed or limited posters. New suggestions welcome. Rich -------------------- Quoting James Propp <jpropp@cs.uml.edu>:
Here are some minuses of "outing" math-fun in print:
1) Having a flood of new subscribers could be a drain on Rich's time for a week or two.
2) There is the risk that a few people who don't fit in with the group and who post too much could lower the overall quality of the posts and take away some of the value of math-fun for the rest of us (remember what happened to sci.math?).
3) I'd hate to put Rich in the position of having to ban people from the group (temporarily or permanently), especially in cases where the "offense" isn't a matter of rudeness but a matter of the content of the person's posts.
But I think that the big plus of publicizing the group (in a low-key way) is that we'd be opening up the group to people who should be part of math-fun but don't have the good fortune to be part of the informal network that brought us all into math-fun in the first place. As things stand now, we run the risk of turning the group into an old boy's network, not by design but by default.
(And yes, when I say "boy" I say it advisedly. There aren't many women in the group, and they seldom post. This is one sign that we aren't casting our net wide enough to bring in the people who should be in the group but who don't know about it.)
Jim
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