Well, I wasn't proposing making a circulation list of emails. What I was proposing is that S&K might maintain a single alternative email address purely for 'emergencies' by which they can be contacted by any of us if the forum is down - the address they provided for contact on the website went down with the forum so we couldn't email them. A simple hotmail, yahoo or gmail address would do. It doesn't need to be more public than the forum itself. Possibly publish it on a pinned forum post (say in the forum rules section). I don't want to make too much of it as an idea, it was just a passing thought.
However, because K&S look at the site reasonably frequently, that is our insurance against a prolonged outage. Mind you, if there was a side email address than enquirers could be briefed on what's happening. By contrast, on TSNS, the site holder Lookee seemingly didn't look at the site from one month to the next and several times forgot to pay the subscription leaving us with a prolonged outage. Did we ever get any explanation of why it went permanently?
As to keeping an email circulation list, I am very much in two minds. What I would seek to avoid is having a deluge of email addresses from every forum member. Also if there were a prolonged forum outage, I would definitively not support becoming the de facto owner of an email-based pseudo-forum. My email address only has the minimum space allocation and would soon run out I'm sure. Perhaps if I collected about 6-8 emails of the most frequent posters, Jbee, eyesup, Bob, JOhnGW, JohnP, Nudewalker, Blue Train, PeterS and Ric and perhaps Karla & Stuart, that accounts for the people who account for a little over 80% of all the traffic ever on the forum. If you PM me I could add the few emails to my Nudukial contact list. However, heavens forfend, in the event of the forum becoming permanently unusable, as I say, email should only be used for a brief interchange to decide if and where to go next. In any event the problem will be how will the vast majority of members that want to find eachother do so if we had to move house suddenly. It was the same with TSNS - we just lost nearly all of the members.
Don't I recall that quite a few years ago, after one of the TSNS outages that we started an emergency Yahoo group? Does that still exist? I remember creating a yahoo email address or yahoo identity at the time but rarely if ever used it. The 3 or 4 email addresses I do have were from private correspondence with others prior to and during meeting them. Maybe that's a better course of action. To find that group, revivify it and on the FRN forum advertise its existence?
John
