Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing-L tailing off

[Fred H. Olson (fholson]

I dont really remember the drop off after the 2nd quarter 1995
shown in Stu's graph.  Every time I've looked at number of messages
I seem to  put the results someplace different and cant find them 
later...   The drop off in the first quarter of 1996 coincided with 
our move and I've presumed that they were related.

Cohousing-L was down for the month of Feb 1996 while we moved to a
different listserver and host. After we resumed operation at
cohousing.org (currently really mtn.org) in March 1997 we have had
considerably fewer messages. The two structural changes that help
explain the change are:

1) The headers of messages from the list are now configured so
that most mailer's "Reply" command sends the message to the
author of the message rather than to the list.  Tho it's generally
not hard to reply to the list.

2)  I forward many fewer messages that get "rejected" due to problems
such as being posted from a non subscribed address.  The newer version
sends the message back to the author with a note that it was not
posted leaving the poster to take the initiative to get it posted.
Tho I get notified (as list manager) of rejected messages, it's done in
a much less obvious way so I often don't notice rejected messages.

I have not felt the smaller volume of messages was a problem.
Back when we got 300 messages per month just before the move
there were lots of complaints about too much volume.

I've expected the number of messages to grow but it hasn't so far.

I've thought about getting the "Reply" default back to
the list at least as an experiment to see if it resulted in
more replies but have not gotten around to it.  There is some
controversy among list managers about this as it requires
having the listserver change headers which some consider
verboten.  As I recall I tried to do an analysis of the average
number of replies before and after the change and it did not seem
to be too great.

As far as the number of subscribers:

11/92  list started
12/93  161 subscribers
12/94  276 subscribers
12/95  513 subscribers

Since about Oct 1995 (the last 15 months) there have been around
500 subscribers.  There seems to be a bit of a spurt lately to
534 subscribers.




--
Fred H. Olson  fholson [at] tc.umn.edu
(612)588-9532  Amateur radio: WB0YQM      List manager of:
Cohousing-L  See http://www.cohousing.org/    and
Twin Cities Neighborhood issues list. See http://freenet.msp.mn.us/