Bart van Rotterdam wrote,
>>Staying with the bionet newsgroup is fine with me and I am willing to become
>the moderator, that is the spam deleter, when someone can give me
>instructions on how arrange that. I checked the BIONET website and it
>appears to me that one has to opt for becoming the moderator whilst setting
>up the newsgroup account. I did not figure out how to become moderator of an
>existing group when it is setup in an unmoderated fashion only having a
>discussion leader, in this case James Woods.
>If you are willing to do the moderation that will be great, and I certainly
support the principle of moderation. (Though we shouldn't forget that when
Paul Schlosser organized a vote the margin in favour was very small: we
shouldn't stampede the others into moderation if there is still appreciable
opposition).
On the general issue of why this group is in such poor health there are a
number of not necessarily related points I think it worth making:
1. Nearly all the BioNet groups I look at are in much worse shape now than
they were about three years ago. Even those that are still quite lively
(e.g. the microbiology group) are less so than they were even a year ago. I
do NOT notice any similar trend in the other (non-biological) groups I
visit, e.g. on yahoo or google groups. Maybe it's just that biologists are
a bit disillusioned with news groups, finding that they are not living up
to their promise of a few years ago. I hope that is not true, but it's
certainly not just this group that has fallen on bad times.
2. Something I found very striking was that during the period when Pentcho
was favouring us with his views there were quite a lot of contributions on
more interesting subjects as well, but when he went away the good stuff
went away as well, more or less immediately. It was as if people need to
have SOMETHING appearing regularly to whet their appetites, even if it's
just raving about thermodynamics.
3. Although I'm in favour of moderation, I don't think it's the lack of
moderation that's the main problem, it's the lack of a discussion leader.
What we need more than a moderator is an energetic, enthusiastic and
preferably young person who can feed us with interesting things for us to
discuss. After all, Douglas, David and I are nearer to the days of our
compulsory retirement than to the days we started as newly appointed
lecturers, full of enthusiasm at the chance to train eager young minds in
the exciting field of enzyme kinetics and thermodynamics.
4. Len told us
>I don't think this list is dead, just thoughtful ;-). I certainly have a
>lot of questions I'd like to ask but don't want to appear too stupid in
>the asking. I imagine others feel the same.
Please: ASK YOUR QUESTIONS ! We won't think they are stupid. We'll only
think you're stupid if you don't pay any attention to the answers but just
repeat the same old questions over and over and over again. Even Pentcho
drew a great many serious answers before people decided it was a total
waste of time and energy.
5. If possible, I'd prefer to stay with BioNet, for the reason that David
gave: to stay with related groups and with our history and archives.
athel
--
Athel Cornish-Bowden
athel at ibsm.cnrs-mrs.frhttp://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/homepage.htm
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