[bio.dros] Re: Need for Drosophila mailing list?

[ITO, Kei]

>Messages posted to this newsgroup are piped to the dros at net.bio.net
>mailing list and vice versa.  So there is a list, but the discussion
>doesn't go beyond what you see here.
>
>-Adam

To encourage more professional discussion, we need to reduce 
the amount of messages unrelated to Drosophila research. 
One possibility would be to kill the newsgroup. Being open to
billions of Internet users, newsgroup attracts naive questions 
by high school pupils and discussions on god, sex, etc., which are 
cross-posted from other newsgroups. Since a mailing list is 
more closed than a newsgroup, as one must register in order to 
get messages, it can focus more on professional discussion. 
We cannot get rid of those spam mails altogether, but we can
at least reduce their number. Whereas biologists have been using
bionet newsgroups for discussion, physicists and astronomers 
don't rely on newsgroups but have been using mailing lists for 
the same purpose. The existing dros at net.bio.net mailing list 
would be enough for most fly researchers. 

Kei

  ERATO, at Mitsubishi-Kasei Institute of Life Sciences,
  email : itokei at fly.erato.jst.go.jp
  http://flybrain.jst.go.jp/jfly/    (Jfly home page)
  http://flybrain.jst.go.jp/    (Flybrain visual database)