Best place for model railway chat

If you have a topic, say something about it here. No great loss if it leads nowhere because you can paste the same thing into your chosen forum later. Actually, I guess that's what you've done.

I can't recommend a forum, I've joined one or two but I never seem to get around to actually logging in and checking.

I like this place because it will always be here, and it comes to me rather than me having to remember to go and look. The quiet patches are when nobody starts a new topic because nobody has started a new topic (ehich happens on forums as well, especially when they have subforums),

Eric

And that's the advantage of Usenet newsgroups.

You just leave one program running.

Web forums all need to be logged on individually.

But there is an alternative - yahoo email groups, and these are usually more specific than the generic UK railway modelling group.

For example I'm in the 7mm group which is O-gauge specific and the GWR e-list which is GWR specific as well as the small layout and early rail groups.

You can configure your membership so you receive individual emails, a single daily digest email, or only seeing the messages if you log on to yahoo.

I get individual emails.

Merg, the Model Electronic Railway Group has a yahoo group going back to 1999. Some 'enlightened' people decided that a web based list would be better for them, so now we have both :) If it does not pop up locally on my machine as a news item or email, then I'm not interested ... so discussions carry on on yahoo despite attempts to close it down.

Exactly - I don't want to have to keep logging onto different forums.

If the forum and or administrators are any good you can subscribe to topics and be notified of new posts.

MBQ

They both have their place. There is a lot of useful discussion on the forum and the ability to include graphics adds a new dimension.

MBQ

In an ideal world there would not be a problem. The yahoo email interface works fine, but the addition of a few extras that the web based lists provide, such as in-line images, would complete the picture. The half way house of sending emails saying 'go to the website' does not work for me :( The problem in reality is the workload of managing email spam which yahoo does take care off on the whole.

Log in to find topics to subscribe to, login again when notified of messages. So not as great as all that.

Eric

I go with Lester's viewpoint. Also a member of MERG (well worth the £15 annunal sub!) I prefer the Yahoo Groups list. I get a daily digest and can skim down it to posts which interest me. Quick! Then copy and paste the Digest into a file I can keep. If there are any files/pictures I need to look at they are in the appropriate folder on Yahoo Groups. Except that I (personal view here) rarely actually want to.

On the MERG forum however, even using the "unread posts" facility, it takes ages to read each added post or new thread start and then to store the thread into it's own folder on the hard drive. Each to his own, the forum has the only advantage that the pictures/videos/files are embedded in the post entry.

Richard

It's the 'log in' to more than a couple of lists which is the problem. I've just handled some 40 email list entries this morning. If I had to work through 40 logins to see what is new I would still be at it. I get posts from a couple of website notifications ... cnczone for instance ... but while there are couple of possible interesting threads, I can't be bothered to follow up. The likes of merg just adds to that noise but without even providing the list of new posts :(

Perhaps if I didn't have a full time job? But even then I don't think I would be any more active outside of what works for me :)

An interesting development that I have seen is the situation with the newsgroups provided by Embarcadero (provider of software like ex-Borland Delphi) where they have fully integrated an online forum with their newsgroups such that you can post and read on either - so the best of both worlds with Internet and Usenet. I haven't investigated what they can do with email - presumably there could be an RSS feed which would be a read only email feed.

Also, Martin Wynne's Templot forum goes some way towards Internet/email integration, where emails of forum messages are sent to the Templot Yahoo email group, with links for any pictures posted. You do have to go to the forum to post any messages, but at least you can monitor the forum on email quite easily.

Otherwise, I do frequent quite a few Internet forums and it does take a lot longer to keep track of what might be going on, but that seems to be what a lot of our online participants want these days - possibly because they have never known about Usenet (and a lot of providers don't supply it now) and they don't seem to want to know about email groups like Yahoo supply.

Jim.

Don't quite understand the problem since with Yahoo Groups you can receive the posts as either individual emails, or a daily digest as email, and also reply by email, without going any where near a internet browser.

Jeff

Which was of course my original point - I was agreeing with Lester.

There is no problem with yahoo groups ;) The problem is with groups of people who want to replace them with on-line forums because they don't like yahoo groups .... which is what has been tried at merg, resulting in two lists since some of us can't be bothered to log in to check if we need to register for new threads :) Yahoo lists work well enough and handle all the agro of email spam, so building a suitable replacement needs a lot of effort with little real gain?

In message , Lester Caine writes

I've run several in the past, and there is a great deal wrong with them. Yahoo are somewhat uncommunicative, even with list owners, and it is not uncommon for members to stop getting mails because of minor service problems. When I started using them, it was two owners before yahoo, and they were so much better.

Adrian

Certainly egroups was much better, but I've not had any major problems with any that I moderate in the last few years. email traffic is getting blocked all the time and one can look on line in that case anyway.

I WOULD like a nice software package that did the job properly though :)