[This is an ADMINISTRATIVE message, so questions or comments should be
directed to
the listowner and will not be posted to PCBUILD]
Fellow List Members,
PCBUILD is moving to a new home next week. Along with many
other lists currently hosted at St. John's University, we are moving to a
new service called ICORS. Please read below for the relevant
history and
explanations of why and how this new service will be set up, and what it
will mean for you.
After over 15 years of service to the community, St. John's University
has
informed all list owners that it will discontinue service early in
February. St. John's "Maelstrom" server, prior to this
announcement, had
590 lists that it maintained, with about 150,000 total subscribers. Most
of these lists focus on family, health, and disability issues, and many
provide essential information to people who have no other source for it.
The first list went online in the summer of 1990.
There was no particular reason given for this recent decision, but we
believe it is related to the costs which St. John's would occur to
upgrade
the now- ancient Maelstrom server to a more modern and reliable hardware
and software platform, and the relative ease of moving the lists to
another service.
WHO IS ICORS?
Four managers/list owners at Maelstrom have put their heads together and
incorporated a non-profit organization to take the place of Maelstrom,
for
those lists that wish to migrate to a new server. The organization
is
named the " Information Center for Online Resources and Services,
Inc.",
or ICORS for short. You can see their current web site at
http://www.icors.org/.
ICORS has made an arrangement with LSoft, the company which makes the
Listserv software used for our list. LSoft has probably the longest
experience of any single company in the world at hosting mailing lists,
and has agreed to donate the hosting services for ICORS, just as St.
John's University donated services for the Maelstrom system.
However,
unlike the older system used for Maelstrom, the lists will be hosted on
up
to date hardware and will use the latest version of Listserv. For
this we
thank Eric Thomas.
Some of the major reasons we chose ICORS to host our list are that at
ICORS we are working with people we know and who will actually answer our
questions and attend to our needs (something that's virtually impossible
at the larger hosting services); that ICORS is focused specifically on
health, disability, and family issues; that LSoft has such extensive and
pioneering experience in list hosting; and that the migration can be done
without very little effort by us or by you.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN IN PRACTICE?
What this means for you is, first of all, that you can expect the list to
function almost exactly as it has in the past. The move to ICORS
will be
handled by the list managers and ICORS staff. You will not have to
resubscribe or make any other changes, except in the address you use to
send messages to the list, and to re-establish your password on the new
system. List policies affecting what you may post to the list and
other
rules of etiquette and practice will remain the same.
In addition all of the list archives will be maintained, and older
archives which were removed a few months ago may be reinstated as the new
system has much greater storage capacity than the old.
You have to do no more than three things:
(1) The list will most likely move to the new system
on Wednesday,
January 11. Once this happens (NOT YET -- we
will notify you when
it is time), begin sending your messages to the list
to our new
address, [log in to unmask] Similarly,
the address for
contacting the list owners will change to
[log in to unmask] You can
continue to contact
the listowners directly at:
Bob
Wright<[log in to unmask]>
Drew
Dunn<[log in to unmask]>
(2) If you have established a password so that you can
view the list
archives or perform other online tasks related to your
subscription
to the list using a web browser, it will be lost in
the move. We will provide
instructions for re-establishing your password and
viewing the
archives in a separate message.
(3) If you have filters on your email address to allow
email messages
from the list, you will need to change them to receive
messages from
ICORS. The best way to do this is to set your
email account now to
allow messages from all
[log in to unmask] The list will continue
to have the distinctive [PCBUILD] in the beginning of
the subject line for ease
of creating filters... that will not
change.
Messages sent to the old list address will be forwarded automatically to
the new list for some undetermined time after the list is moved, probably
3 - 4 weeks, but you should not rely on this. So be prepared to
switch
addresses when we tell you to do so next week.
The list will be migrated "en bloc" and should be down only a
few hours
while this happens. This should in no way cause anyone any
significant
downtime or delay.
Bob Wright
Managing General Partner
The NoSpin Group, Inc. - (An Idaho non-profit corporation)
http://nospin.org -
http://nospin.com -
http://freepctech.com
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