Seqfan Site, Newsgroup, etc.

[Olivier Gerard]

Dear Antti and all,

I have reserved and used as a front page the domain name seqfan.net
to have a place in common for us for *public* information about
seqfan but also sequences.

I welcome any idea on making this a better companion site to the EIS.
As I said before, I have large control over what can be put there,
and not only text files.

The mailing list is another thing altogether.  My already long
experience on newsgroups and mailing lists convinces me that
this list should stay private (i.e. no external posting allowed)
and as many of the members have subscribed knowing this was the
case, I have certainly no intent to post publicly any seqfan list
mail or email address without prior consent or initiative of the
members involved.

Now, the mail order archive system is cumbersome and without
visibility, especially for new members so I have prepared a private
browsable archive with monharc and a few other tools but requests
have been very seldom, and almost always from people able to
massage the archive in their own prefered format and tools.
So I have not put it online but I could if there is sufficient interest.
In this case I would make it restricted to seqfan members
so email harvesting would not be a concern.

We could consider making a newsgroup out of seqfan, but frankly
I think it would be a waste of time and peace.  Seqfan is already
very open (compare that to mathfun for the people who can), and
I never refuse someone who has made a contribution on the EIS.
My only requirement these days is to have a valid, non advertisement
postscripting email address and just to ask for it. This insures
the minimum level of motivation and interest to keep administrating
this list to a minimum compatable with my personal, academic and 
private life.

Like in a newsgroups, most members just read and don't contribute
but unlike most newsgroups, we don't need moderators and we don't 
experience flame wars.  The OEIS pages serve as a reference and
as a FAQ.  I am very much concerned about keeping the noise level
of seqfan as low as possible, and this not very easy in a newsgroup.

If you have reflexions on the newsgroup proposal or other modifications
of seqfan, please email them directly to Neil, me and Antti, because I don't
want to bother other members when possible on this meta-subject. 

Regards,

Olivier


On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 06:43:43PM +0200, Antti Karttunen wrote:
> 
> Dear Olivier,
> 
> seeing that there's not yet much activity in www.seqfan.net,
> I suggest that you make the archives of SeqFan-list
> (from  Listserv at Ext.jussieu.fr) available there
> (either as a static Web-pages, or through some dynamic
> script), because currently they are very difficult to access
> via SeqFan-bitserv's own request-mechanism,
> unless you want to delimit access only to SeqFan-members
> themselves. Indeed, the publishing of e-mail addresses
> occurring in the headers of SeqFan-messages
> to any web-browsing robot might be a problem viz-a-viz spammers.
> On the other hand, I guess that the most SeqFanatics
> that have mailed to the list have already published their
> mail-addresses in the entries they have submitted to EIS.
> 
> I guess the voice of the SeqFan-members should
> be heard on this... Maybe one could use a "clever"
> anti-spamming substitution like
> sed -e 's/@/@supprimez./g' when transferring
> the archives in bulk..
> (This probably breaks some Mathematica code also,
> so should preferably be applied only to the headers
> and nearby of the messages.)
> 
> Salut,
> 
>   Antti
>