might move MWcybercourse to a new service

["Wendy Petti" <wpetti@xxxx>]

In reply to Gary's remark about Yahoo's harassment of folks:

I have given this a good deal of thought today with a similar
reaction. Yahoo has become increasingly unpleasant to use. My own
MWcybercourse messages often end up in the junk mail folder of my
e-mail program due to the ads Yahoo places at the bottom of the
messages. It takes extra clicks to navigate past the immense ads
when trying to read the archived messages online. This new
information that Yahoo will ignore its many members' wishes in
respect to junk mail and require monthly insistence that we really
don't want to be on their junk mail lists feels like the last straw
to me. I would like to point out, however, that even if I move
MWcybercourse to a new hosting service, many members of this group
are also members of the LogoForum, which is a Yahoo Group, and
anyone remaining on that list will still have the monthly hassle of
reaffirming their wish to remain off of the junk mail lists.

I do have a solution for our group, however, which would not cost
any money. As part of my Math Cats website hosting, I am entitled
to set up a mail list for up to 250 subscribers for no additional
cost. I have not used this feature with my own Math Cats News (a
monthly e-newsletter) because my subscriber list is larger than
that. But as the MWcybercourse group is well within the 250-member
limit (we currently have 67 members), I think it would work quite
well to relocate it to my web-hosting service. This would mean
changing the address for sending messages, and it would have to
include mathcats.com as part of the address, but it would still be
us! Members of the group would still be able to select the option
of individual messages or daily digest and would still be able to
read archived messages online. We'd still be able to share
attachments.

I would like a bit of input on if you think it would be a good idea
to move MWcybercourse to an ad-free, hassle-free hosting service
such as the one provided by my Math Cats web-hosting service. I
have created a poll at the MWcybercourse site for this purpose, and
I hope all of you will cast your vote. Go to:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MWcybercourse/polls

to place your vote.

For those of you who are unable to access the MWcybercourse site due
to restrictions from your school's web server, please write to me
off-list indicating your preference among these four current
choices:

1) Leave MWcybercourse on Yahoo Groups.
2) Move MWcybercourse to the ad-free hosting service available
through Wendy's Math Cats account.
3) Move MWcybercourse to topica.com, another free site which
subjects members to ads but perhaps not as insistently as Yahoo
Groups does. This option would require each member to resubscribe;
Wendy cannot move you herself.
4) Have Wendy pay for a new ad-free list-hosting service for
MWcybercourse.

If you are voting by e-mail, send your votes to:
mailto:wpetti@xxxx

<a href="mailto:wpetti@xxxx";>wpetti@xxxx</a>

I am hoping and trusting that if I move the list, you will all
remain subscribers and that we can kick this list back into a more
active state!

And by the way, please let me know if you have a better name to
suggest for the list than MWcybercourse! If we move the list
anyhow, we can pick any name we like. For instance...
MicroWorlds-sharing ??? This list is not in fact a cybercourse; it
was originally created for the purpose of communally developing a
MicroWorlds cybercourse but its purpose has shifted, and so a name
change is probably in order.

(And Gary, I'm sorry no one has given you feedback on your student's
project yet. It was pegged as a "game of life" project but was
different in structure from the "game of life" implementations that
had been shared earlier. I did not quite understand it myself
though I found it quite intriguing. I am wondering if you or your
student could provide to us a bit more explanation of what it is
illustrating and how it resembles and differs from more conventional
"game of life" implementations.)

And finally, for the sake of those receiving the daily digest, I'd
like to remind you all to delete the unneeded portions of messages
to which you are replying.

Thank you all!

Wendy Petti
MWcybercourse moderator

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gary McCallister [mailto:mccallis@xxxx]
> Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 6:00 PM
> To: MWcybercourse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: how to avoid Yahoo Groups junk mail
>
>
> I sent a program the other day of a type of cellular
> automata developed by my student but received not
> responses. It came through on my message, but I am
> wondering if anyone else resceived it.
> Yahoo needs to know that if this change results in a
> lot of harrasment for folks, many people (myself) will
> just drop the list. I fear the e-companies begin to
> forget that the internet is optional.