Hello
This is intreresting, the world certainly has changed. When Andre left HUT
he asked if someone would like to take rp-ml and start
hosting/administrating it. Not so many people wanted to do that. Now a
whole lot of people are willing to take the list. Well boys and girls, the
list is not for sale and I'll do everything in my power to keep the list
here, where it was originated and developed. Thanks for the offers though
- I really do appreciate the concern of the future of rp-ml.
And special thanks to all of you who have offered donations and good
advices / pointers to new directions. I'll take a closer look at them
a.s.a.p.
And what comes to donations, I'll keep in mind all of you and will return
to this IF the money is really needed. Just to avoid confucions, the 2kUSD
is NOT for the administration of this list - it's just the price of a
hardware and internet access. I'm currently talking to some people about
this, and it may well be that we will find relatively satisfying solution
(ie. reliable and fast enough, inexpencive connection) - and it may be that
we don't even need that 2k.
To answer some of the questions and proposals, I think I should tell you a
bit what I think about rp-ml. First of all, rp-ml has always been an
independent source of information, and I hope that will never change. If
external funding (donations whatever) turns out to be a threat to the
independency - the offers will be rejected and I'll find another
way. Another basic thing about rp-ml is the free access and ease of
use. Anybody should be able to join and leave as they will. The messages
are delivered automagically to your doorstep like the morning paper - and
you do not need to go to a local library, news stand what ever to read
them. This is cornerstone number two. Third cornerstone is
cheapness. Since the list is free it really cannot be any cheaper - unless
someone pays you to join it... And this is how it should be. I'm not going
to set a membership fee (although it would clean the list from lurkers -
but that's not what I want to do. Lurkers in rp-ml are people in need of
information and if this list cannot provide that information, what good is
it? The fourth cornerstone, and propably the most important one is the
fact that there's always someone to answer your questions and help you with
your problems. And that someone is YOU and in some administrative minority
of questions, me. If the list looses any of these four cornerstones, I'm
afraid it's not worth the effort. So lets cool out a bit, and I'll see
what can be done - it'll propably take some weeks to do it, but I'll let
you know what crawled out under the rock.
And for those of you who have asked details about the rp-ml:
nearly 1800 subscribers generate (roughly average) about 10 emails / day,
that'll ad up to 18000 emails, 7 days a week through the year, nonstop...
plus there's about 10-20 informative messages to admin from every singl
post to rp-ml (telling me that someone somewhere has a badly configured
server, server malfunction, is out of office or exeed hes/hers quota
etc.). 4 - 5 people susbscribe/unsubscribe every day. 5 to 10 questions
each day - and about the same amount of misdirected emails...
Quite a lot of traffic - and that's international traffic, for those who
have to pay extra for that.
That was only informative, I think I will find a place for one single
server somewhere near here...
Btw. I think that use of the name rp-ml in any other list or service is at
least unethical and feels really bad, so get rid of that yahoo list, please.
Lets keep Sharing and Enjoying - and yes, I know where my towel is...
Hannu Kaikonen
aka. Rapid Dude
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jan 04 2002 - 09:57:10 EET