I agree as well.
Gerard Lillie
Portland, OR
________________________________
Subject: [obol] Re: OBOL and WhatsApp groups
What Paul said---amen.
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul T. Sullivan
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2021 10:00 AM
To: OBOL
Subject: [obol] Re: OBOL and WhatsApp groups
Brodie,
I hear what you are saying and appreciate your efforts to make communication
among Oregon birders work. I favor efforts to preclude spam.
I have subscribed to several of the WhatsApp groups and found them useful
for hearing about rare birds that I might try to chase, including up-to-date
info. They do contain comments like "I'm on my way" and "I can't some
until tomorrow" which add little value.
The main criticism of all this is that:
a) it is not statewide, so folks who do not live in a particular area or
subscribe to all 18 groups do not hear about notable birds, and
b) there is no compilation of the reported birds in an archive. You don't
get "A Masked Whatsit appeared at Newport from July 10 - Aug 21 and was seen
by many. It was the second record for the state. The previous sighting was
on Rummel Street, McMinnville, in Paul Sullivan's yard in September 1988."
That's where OBOL and Oregon Birds come in. I encourage all the folks who
only use WhatsApp and eBird (are you listening?) to tune in to these older,
traditional channels of reporting bird sightings.
Thank you,
Paull Sullivan
------------------------------------
OBOL Oregon
Date: 10/21 3:32 AM
From: Brodie Cass Talbott <brodiecasstalbott...>
Subject: [obol] WhatsApp groups
Hi all,
Just wanted to update you all on the status of the various statewide
WhatsApp groups. In case you are unfamiliar with these groups, they are
generally more locally-focused groups for local notables and real -time
rarity updates, and have so far been listed in a directory on the OBA page
.
The various admins of the now 18 WhatsApp groups in the state have
struggled with the competing interests of making these groups easy to find
and join, and also safe and secure from spammers. Unfortunately a number of
the groups were hit by explicit spam last month. So, in response, all of
the links to join these groups have been changed, and have not been updated
on the website, out of fear of more spamming. For now, if you want to join
a group, you need to find out who the admins are, and contact them directly
to add you.
Also in the last two weeks, the Portland group has filled to the point that
we cannot add more participants. This is a quirk of WhatsApp. To
accommodate more users, we have migrated the list to Telegram. Telegram is
another messaging app that is also free, and end-to-end encrypted. It has
several benefits over WhatsApp, including larger group sizes, and the
ability of admins to delete problematic messages (which is inexplicably
missing from WhatsApp).
There has been a little bit of a learning curve with the new app, but the
basic operation is the same.
Our hope is that with this increased ability to moderate spam, we will be
able to add the Portland group back to the OBA directory. I have talked
with several other admins, and the thought is that if the Telegram
experiment goes well, other groups may follow, for all of the reasons
above. All of us are loathe to change platforms, but in the long run, we
hope it will be a big improvement. And in my opinion, a group where someone
can post explicit or hateful messages, and no one has any ability to remove
that post, is not a safe and welcoming platform of the kind we are trying
to create.
We'll be keeping the Portland list on WhatsApp until November 1 so that
people have time to see that the list has moved. Another nice feature of
Telegram is that when you join, you can see the previous messages before
your join date, making the entire thread back to when the list started in
2019 searchable by any user.
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions about any of this!
Cheers,
Brodie Cass Talbott
NE Portland
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