[Rd] requesting a new SIG mailing list

[Sarah Goslee]

Dear Martin,

Thank you for confirming what I'd already suspected
about the mailing list software.

I've added hydrology explicitly to the list description, and
hope that the hydrologists find it a welcoming home. We've
got a solid core of participants, so R users should
find it a useful resource.

Sarah

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 6:39 AM, Martin Maechler
<maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm the "site maintainer" of the R-SIG-... at r-project.org mailing
> lists (and back from vacations).
>
>>>>>> Sarah Goslee <sarah.goslee at gmail.com>
>>>>>>     on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:16:01 -0500 writes:
>
>    > Hi all,
>    >> It would be great if Sara of someone of the maintainers
>    >> of the r-sig-ecology list could add that info to the info page.
>
>    > I'm talking with the other maintainer about revising both
>    > the short and the long descriptions.
>
>    >> I think that r-sig-env would be much more intuitive for
>    >> environmental scientists coming from fields different
>    >> from ecology, but I don't think it is possible to change
>    >> the name of an existing mailing list.
>
> yes, that would be only doable with much effort,
> and (unless even more effort is put in) it would invalidate all
> current links to the current archives etc.
>
>    >> However, I'm wondering if it would be possible to create
>    >> an alias termed 'r-sig-env' to 'r-sig-ecology' ?, in
>    >> order to make the name of the list more intuitive for
>    >> environmental scientists but without disturbing the
>    >> current users.
>
>    > I don't know that there is any mechanism for doing either
>    > of those things.  Changing the name would be disruptive,
>    > and I don't know of an alias option.
>
> there is none, on the mailing list level.
> On the mail server side, I could create such aliases,
> but then these would only apply to e-mail addresses and the ML
> software would still "speak" of the official ML name...
>
> Given all the issues and opinions heard so far, I'd also
> propose trying to have hydrologists and other env.scientists
> join the r-sig-ecology for the time being.
>
> Brian Ripley has already mentioned the very important point,
> that there's some often non-negligible admin overhead for each
> list, and I can add that indeed, we have had several lists that
> always remained too small and so never "started flying".
>


-- 
Sarah Goslee
http://www.functionaldiversity.org