[GSBN] Admin: Proposal for Non-posting subscribers

[Bill Christensen]

Hi folks,

As y'all might know by now, the GSBN discussions are interesting and 
popular, not just with GSBN folks but with others in the straw building 
world as well.

We've long made the archives available to all.  Google and other search 
engines regularly crawl the archives, so they're easily searchable by 
putting "GSBN" and your topic in the search field.

But we also regularly get requests from non GSBN people who just want to 
be able to receive and read the emails and learn from them, without 
participating in the discussion.  I just got another compelling request 
the other day which caused me to re-think things.

Right now, GSBN is set up as an invitation-only list.  I'm the only one 
who can subscribe people.  If instead we changed the setup such that 
*anyone* can subscribe but only specific people (the current and future 
invited membership) can post to the discussion, with any other posts to 
the list getting rejected/returned to the sender, I think we can expand 
GSBN's influence.  The whole point is to spread knowledge of best 
practices, after all.

One change which would come from this is that those of us with multiple 
addresses would have to post from the correct one or we'll receive a 
rejection notice.  Up til now I've been getting a notice any time one of 
you does that, then going in and reviewing the message and manually 
approving them for publication to the list.  That won't happen any more.

The only other potential downside - and it's sort of a moot point since 
the archives are published automatically - is that we would want to 
watch what we say about specific problems with specific projects.  Not 
naming owners or builders or otherwise pointing fingers that could be 
followed by insurance companies or lawyers, for instance.  I think we're 
all pretty careful about that anyway as most of us have been on the 
internet long enough to know that no email is truly private.

I'm not attached to the decision either way but I'd like to hear some of 
your thoughts.

-- 
Bill Christensen

<http://SustainableSources.com>