Death of a listserve? Masterstf mailing list is comatose
In late January 1999, national-class sprinter Gerry Krainik of Illinois launched a listserve, or Internet mailing list, on a site called egroups. Later egroups was bought by Yahoo Groups, and the list grew to nearly 800 subscribers. Today it appears dead. Only two posts are recorded on this page for November. But the online archive (including hundreds of my own posts over the years) isn’t accessible. You can’t read what anyone’s posted. Is this a technical hiccup, or a death wheeze? I’m not sure. I’m checking it out. The loss of the archive would be a huge blow to our collective memory. It served as THE masters track bulletin board for seven years.
4 Responses
Thanks for looking into this. We both discussed this via email earlier, and I’m highly alarmed. This vibrant community–still 800 subscribers–and its rich archives were suddenly and quietly shutoff 1-2 months ago. I enjoyed being able to post, and reading things like: the head of USATF-NE providing schedule information, fellow athletes sharing injury advice, and debating USATF problems, in order to improve our sport.
What’s going on? If the list manager is busy, we can easily find another volunteer to handle duties.
In the meantime, we have nowhere else to go except Ken’s great new forums (which are growing, but not as big as yahoo): http://www.masterstrack.com/phpBB2/index.php
Sadly, the list itself was about as Ameri-centric as Steve’s comment.
Quick Silver
Hong Kong
It takes people like you Quick Silver, Weia and others to make any list serve global. As an english speaking list, we americans will talk about what we know and care about. As typical americans, we don’t know much and won’t have much to say about those funny sounding foreigners from where ever they are from.
Huh- ameri-centric – duh – that is like complaining that a German e-list is German-centric. It is (or maybe was) a US and English language based e-list – anyone with some command of the English language could comment on it. The fact that probably 99% of those commenting were from the US – sort of reinforces that fact that it is (was) an American-centered e-list. I do not think it is up to the Americans on the list to make it something else. The lack of a broader world view is too bad – but not the fault of the e-list members. There was no nationality test to post. Had there been more comments from around the world I think all of us who read the e-list would have been very happy to see that.
Ken’s new blog also is dominated by American bloggers – but appears to be open to any and all bloggers of any nationality as long as they do not dump spam on it. I have noticed that there are some Canadian bloggers and also one from Hong Kong named Quick Silver. So – Quick Silver -get your friends to join the blog. I for one would love to hear more about the world of masters running in various parts of the world.
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