mbarrick | Nov. 15th, 2003

Nov. 15th, 2003

The GothicBC YahooGroup's days are numbered. This is a good thing.

When the Gothic BC group was set up in November 2000 it was on a service called eGroups, which even longer ago used to be called OneList. OneList/eGroups were relatively ad-free and quite friendly to use. Then Yahoo bought them around about September 2001. People were not happy. There was much confusion about converting accounts to Yahoo, and the advertising became much more intrusive. Since then it's only gotten worse with more ads and features being revoked.

Well, no more. I was lamenting this issue with Avi a couple weeks ago and he has very kindly set up a listserv on his machine. For the past week I've been fiddling around getting the interface to match the rest of the Gothic BC website (something I could never do with Yahoo) and making a comprehensive archive on my own server, also integrated with the website. It's all done now and I am ready to start moving people over to the new site.

One you are moved over you will receive a welcome message telling you how to get at your settings and the new address to post to, not that any of it is terribly difficult. The website for the list is linked off the Gothic BC homepage (http://www.gothic.bc.ca) and the new address(es) are simple - mail to either list@gothic.bc.ca or gothic-bc@lists.gothic.bc.ca. Be sure to update your address book after you receive the welcome message.

As I convert people over I will do my best to maintain settings such as who receives the daily-digest, who gets every e-mail, etc. There are 196 members to convert, so I apologise in advance if I make any mistakes.

In the interim, existing members can still post to the YahooGroup and all
messages to the Yahoo group and the new group are being stored in the
unified archive at http://www.gothic.bc.ca/listarchive.htm but I won't be
approving any new members to the Yahoo group.

Yahoo can blow me ;-)

The Gothic BC mailing list moved over to the new listserv. All the memberships are converted and the old Yahoo group is closed to new posts and new members. Now we'll see if improving things increaces membership or decreaces it like when Elaine and Seth moved Gothic Unlimited off of MSN for similar reasons. No biggie if it does, the photogallery is the main draw, and the all of this is really just a hobby anyway. That's what amuses me about its popularity - I don't really care if it is popular. I'm doing it for fun. It would be nice if some of the thousands of people who look at the site coughed up the occasional donation, though. The popularity of the site makes a more expensive hobby than it would be otherwise. So far this year I've put about $700 or so into it, with another $1300 going in within the next week or two, and total donations for 2003 have been $20.91. That's a whopping 1% of this year's cost. Not to mention that, with the exeption of Sin City, I've always paid cover for the events I've gone to photograph. Why should I stiff Isaac or whatever band I might want to take pictures of? That doesn't exactly help the scene along does it?

I've been asking for the money to upgrade now for two years now and have received, discounting a loan from my mom that I've removed from the donations progress page since it wasn't really for the site per se (but rather to help me stay sane when the site was my only creative outlet and all my money was going to $6/lb organic asparagus), a whopping 13% of what I need to upgrade that has already gone into a UPS and a hard drive. I'm tossing in the other $1300 in from my own pocket. Why? Because there are other things I want to fuck around with (like my Wiki variant, Alph) that I don't dare make live because they'll kill my five-year old PoS "server" (which, truth be told, started life as my desktop machine) and to build an environment closer to the what we'll have at work next year. So yeah. I'm going to buy a "real" (bottom end) server and it will have the side effect of making the picture database work faster, but if that were the only motivation, I'd say, "Ask me if I really care all that much if the images are a bit slow to load." My toy, my hobby, you don't like it, well fine, you get what you pay for.

None of this rant appies to anyone who can actually see it, though (friends only). You guys have always been supportive and appreciative, which I appreciate. I'm just ranting, but the people I have in mind are those that have yelled at me (or my friends) over "bad" pictures, the ones that leave negative comments on the site that I delete, the people that walk up to me and start conversations with "I hear you're an asshole" (Yes, that really happened), the people who expect me to know every detail of every digital camera ever made and corner me at the club with tedious questions, the ~~people~~ person who accused me of masterminding a conspiracy, the people who flog the server looking for and downloading every single picture that has a nipple in it, the total strangers who offer suggestions on how to make the site "better" when they don't know an <a> tag from a <b> tag, the people who somehow think I make a living off a site with no advertising and no fees, and all the other shitwits who in one way or another take the fun out of it. They can go fuck themselves.

And that's why I've moved list off Yahoo. I hate seeing all the damn ads. I don't need an X-cam, my cats don't like Friskies, I already have a Visa card, and I remember when the 'net was strictly non-commercial...