VA-Birders,
Curious about other state's birding lists, I did a little research on
Birdingonthe.net to learn about their sponsorship and servers. I
picked 15 states at random. Here's what I found:
Two states (California and Alabama) use Yahoo Groups which is free,
but includes some advertising.
Seven states use Listserv email list manager, a product of L-Soft.
Some of these states have some sponsorship by or affiliation with
universities or audubon.org. These universities and Audubon
probably own the list management software and require the birding
list to share in the cost. Maryland apparently doesn't have an
affilitation, but uses L-Soft EASE, a hosting service, and it shares
the server with other lists. Listserv does cost bucks, depending on
many factors, and it looks to me like it could be a few hundred to a
couple thousand, unless Virginia-Birds had some sponsorship.
Colorado uses Lyris, and other states seem to use an unidentified
server of the flagship university in their state.
Fourteen out of 15 states' search engines were a pleasure to use. You
could narrow the search in various ways and find a report from a
particular date range quickly and easily. The only exception to this
was Ohio. To search its archives you had to search each month of each
year separately. Ugh. I didn't find any states that use FreeLists,
but there may be some.
If Virginia birders want to be able to post messages and search its
archives reliably and efficiently, I think a change is needed. I
subscribe to one Yahoo Group. It works just fine and the archives are
easy to use. It does come with some advertising. If that is not
acceptable, then I think we should investigate ways of finding funds
and/or a university affiliation. I do encourage members of birding
organizations around the state to include this issue as an agenda
item at their next meeting and use this list to let the state-wide
birding community know how its membership feels about a change.
Paula Sullivan
Alexandria
You are subscribed to VA-BIRD. To post to this mailing list, simply send email
to va-bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxx. To unsubscribe, send email to
va-bird-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field.
