God help me, but I don't know what I'm getting myself into...
Yahoo! has a new feature called Yahoo Clubs. It's a place for cyber
communities that anyone can set up. You can set them up for your friends, your
family, or allow pretty much anyone in. Along with leaving messages, it also
has a chat capability.
Well, as an experiment in cyber community building, I set up a club for
players of GZG games. To go to it, you need a web browser. The URL is:
http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/groundzerogamesplayersclub
If you go to the club listings, it is under Games. Within Games, it is under
Wargaming.
The club is open to everyone. I'm the founder and administrator.
So, what's the charter for this thing, and why do we need it when we have the
mailing list?
The club is for the players of Ground Zero Games games and related games. This
includes Full Thrust 2, Full Thrust Fleet Book, Dirtside 2, Stargrunt 2, and
the B5 Project Earthforce Sourcebook. It does NOT cover FT3 or FMC
discussions, as these are works in progress.
Yeah, but what's the point?
Well, first off it allows web-based chatting. Considering the IRL and
ICQ discussions from a little while ago, I thought that this would be
appropriate. Even if we don't use the club for anything else, it would be well
worth it. No fancy chat clients are needed, just a web browser.
Second, there are a number of people out there who have web access but not
e-mail access. In particular, there are people who have web access from
work but can't participate in mailing lists. This club is for them.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I'm going to take a bit more of a
liberal view of "on topic" and "off topic," at least to begin with. The idea
of the club is NOT to supplant this mailing list. Due to the nature of the
club, though, I believe that it will be easier for it to handle off topic
discussions such as the recent combat engineering, star map, terrorism, etc.
topics. This should ease the strain on the mailing list. That way we can be
far more draconian about what is and isn't on topic on the mailing list as we
now have an alternative forum.
Finally, I'm not sure how much space we have in the club (Yahoo is a little
vague on some of this stuff), or how long messages will sit there, but it
would make a good place to post the FT FAQ, as well as longer term messages
(such as Dean's fleet descriptions from the GenCon tourney).
At the very least, we'll have a place to go to ask, "Is the mailing list
up?"
Anyway, I hope you guys will check it out. I suppose if it doesn't fly I'll
just close it up. I suspect that the chat capability will be worth the price
of admission.
Let me know what you think of it. If you have any questions or concerns, or
(even better!) ideas on what we can do with the club, please let me know.
I, for one, like Allan's idea. What would others think of moving the
chat -
or perhaps starting a new one - to this site?
On Wed, 19 Aug 1998 19:05:00 -0700, Sean Bayan Schoonmaker
<schoon@aimnet.com> wrote:
> I, for one, like Allan's idea. What would others think of moving the
If anyone tries to access the club, it's up and running using the URL I gave.
However, it isn't listed under Games | Wargaming yet. It should be
listed sometime tomorrow.
This sounds identical to the FT Forum - Chat & BBS
I set the FT Forum up to discuss and collate FT FAQ's primarily but decided to
make it open to all sorts of FT (only) discussion.
I its unlikely that two such sites are required or will generate enough
traffic to warrant their continued existence in their current form.
> Tim Jones wrote:
> This sounds identical to the FT Forum - Chat & BBS
I think, (and it's my own opinion and I don't want to annoy anyone!) that
FAQ's tend to get asked and sometimes answered on the mailing list. As it is
very hard for new comers to find out where things are, the mailing list is the
best place to ask questions. Then the person who responds and answers the
questions can gently point out where the FAQ's
are, perhaps in their signature e-mail lines. Something like I'm doing.
I agree that two sites seem somewhat excessive and will lead to a
dilution of effort, particularly as we are not in a free market e-mail
system (user pays e-mail).
> I think, (and it's my own opinion and I don't want to annoy anyone!)
Alternatively wind up the mailing list and move to a BBS forum entirely this
would have some advantages:
o More permanent record of what happened
o Standard intro page for newbies
o Better threading of discussions
o No load on the Bolton list-server
o No admin load for JW
o No 250 emails to wade through if you go off sick for 5 days
o Able to post binary attachments to BBS
o No cost reading stuff you don't want to.
o Better partitioning of topics / subjects
The disadvantages would be:
o No access for non web users (there are some)
o Maybe more spam (perhaps)
> I think, (and it's my own opinion and I don't want to annoy anyone!)
[snip]
> The disadvantages would be:
Have to read/respond on-line.
I *much* prefer the mailing-list format.
- Sam
On Thu, 20 Aug 1998 10:05:00 +0100, Tim Jones
<Tim.Jones@Smallworld.co.uk> wrote:
> This sounds identical to the FT Forum - Chat & BBS
Sorry about that, Tim. I must have missed the messages about this forum. I had
so many GZG mailing list messages when I got back from GenCon (and a bunch I
hadn't read before GenCon) that I skimmed through them and deleted quite a
few. Yours must have been in it.
You're right, we probably don't need both fora. How many people not on the
list are you getting to your site? I'm getting only a small number so far, but
about 1/3 of them aren't on the mailing list. These seem to be people
who just gravitated to Yahoo! and found the club. I suspect that Yahoo! adds
the clubs to their main search engine, so anyone searching in Yahoo! for
anything will also see the club listing.
If we're getting radically different groups of people showing up, then it
might be fine to leave the two sites as they are. However, if we're just
canibalizing each other, I'll shut down in favour of your site since you were
here first.