Re: [UG-ADMINS] Mailing lists

I figured I'd chime in late and mention a few things based on experiences over the years… In my responses below, “we” means Nashville PHP. :-) > I'm curious - and no, I'm not going to ask you to mail something to your > mailing list for me - how often do you mail to your mailing list? Very, very rarely. We usually just rely on Meetup.com to automatically email our members to remind them about meetings. > Is your list discussion list (meetup.com) or a broadcast list (mailchimp)? When we do mail all our members, we use the “announcement” list functionality on meetup.com. I turned off the discussion functionality (more about that below). > If your list is a discussion list, how many emails per week? (aprox) > > Aprox how many do you have on your list? According to meetup.com, 1098 of our 1183 members have opted to receive messages from the organizers (more on that below). > Last one. What is the one thing you've done in the past year that has had > the biggest impact on yuor list? (an email that you sent out that generated > discussion, a rule you put in place, whatever) Nothing sticks out in my mind that we’ve done in the past year, but I did want to write a few lines about experiences using mailing lists. TL;DR: I can’t get group members to participate in mailing list discussions. So, I’ve just given up and disabled group mailing lists. The best experience I had with discussion lists was 14 years ago when Atlanta PHP was just getting started. Hans at New York PHP had a super-active discussion list running on ezmlm. At the time, the PHP general mailing list was also extremely active; it’s where most people I knew went to ask questions for help (in the days before Stack Overflow, etc.). Atlanta PHP reached out to Hans and he offered to host discussion lists for Atlanta PHP on the same servers that hosted the New York PHP lists. Back then, we had a fair amount of discussion on our lists. Over the years, I kept hearing complaints about not having forums, so I set up FUDforum because it had the ability to integrate with a listserv, allowing you to use web-based forums and mailing lists without separating the communication (before the days of Google Groups). A lot of good discussion continued there for a while. Somewhere along the way, it just fizzled out though. (Chris Spruck can probably pick up the story as it relates to Atlanta PHP from here.) After rebooting the Nashville PHP group in 2010, I set up a Google Group. We had a little bit of discussion there over the years, but I was always bothered by something: We had 1000+ members on meetup.com who had opted-in to receive emails there, but we had only 300 members on the Google Group. Each time I sent out an announcement, I had to send it to both lists. Over time, the only posts to the Google Group were my announcements and recruiter job postings, which were very few and far between (and also very light on information, despite instructions detailing how to post). Eventually, I decided to close the Google Group, close the forums on meetup.com, and just stick to the meetup.com mailing list, which I left open for all to post, but no one ever did… until recently. A few months back, a recruiter posted something (the only post ever from someone to this list besides my announcements), and then a member posted a snide comment back to them (and the entire list), and several heated messages were exchanged. I then received private messages from a few people saying that if the list was going to be open to recruiters, they were just going to leave the group (of course, these are people who never attend meetings anyway). I decided to close that list, as well, thus ending my long experiment with user groups and mailing lists. Email is the most important means of communication to me, so it pains me to disable these forms of communication, but I don’t see the value in maintaining them any longer, when they aren’t important communication channels to the majority of our members. Right now, the most important communication channel for the majority of our members is Slack. I’m horrible about keeping up with things there, so I often get left out of a lot of the decisions being made by the group, but it’s what the rest of the group wants, and I’ve learned to be okay with that. :-) Cheers, Ben

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