Lance, > Suddenly, no more messages in my elasticsearch inbox folder and I have > to go to their website to see anything.
You bring up what I think is an important point but I don't think that point is "Mailing lists vs. New Technologies" so much as having all communication of a particular type (say, asynchronous or synchronous) in a single place versus multiple places. I see this as the equivalent of wanting to read an array of blogs, each of which is hosted on a different platform. Getting all groups to use a single mechanism for a particular type of communication (let's stick with asynchronous) is unlikely so one possible answer would a consolidation tool, sort-of like an RSS reader that knows how to read blogs from WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, etc. What complicates things in this case is it needs to be a two-way tool, that is, it needs to let you read all messages in a single place AND when you reply to a message, it gets sent back to the correct source. Even then, consolidation tools necessarily restrict you to the common subset of operations supported by each platform; for everything else you have to go to the source. I don't see this problem ever being solved, and saying "just stick to email" isn't really a solution. I think the main reason so many people say "stick to email" is a combination of a lack of good consolidation tools (or the lack of choice in consolidation tools when compared to the choice of email readers), frustration with any consolidation tools that do exist (mainly because of the limited functionality), and like you discovered, not wanting to lose connection to a community because the "forum" changed in a way that disrupts your patterns. Personally, I solve this problem by being part of very few online communities, and then sticking to ones that I both like and that I like the "forum" they've chosen. For me, this translates to more time away from the computer and that's just fine with me. Adam _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
