Re: [Paddlewise] Keeping kayak club members in touch.

Well, there's no direct payment issue with Majordomo the software 
package - it's free software.  It's only an issue when you start looking 
for some place that hosts a Majordomo system.

Paddlewise (and its associated paddling lists, such as CKF, Baidarka, 
GASP! etc) were originally set up by me at my startup ISP, about 8 years 
ago (Paddlewise is a little younger than that actually, but the point 
remains that I set up Majordomo for paddling lists in 1995).  It moved 
off my company's hosts sometime after we were bought out by another 
company, and now all these Majordomo lists run off my home server. We 
have a full time commercial-grade Internet connection with dedicated IP 
addresses (no dynamic addressing) and it also requires a certain degree 
of dedication on my part too to make sure everything works most of the 
time.  The Paddlewise web site is set up on the same machine as the 
Majordomo server.

So who pays for it?  Mostly me. Kirk is paying for the domain name these 
days, so that's a little less expense for me, but the vast majority of 
the costs are for the DSL line  By reasonable accounting standards some 
share of my computer hardware is devoted to Paddlewise, but those 
expenses are much lower than the DSL line. 

Majordomo software is pretty old by now, and it's a little hard to 
manage message approvals if the list-owner/moderator is not running a 
Unix mail client, but it still works pretty well, and I've put in some 
custom enhancements to make some things run a little better. However, 
here are no web-based mail archives, mostly due to laziness on my part. 
Anyway, it's basically no incremental cost for me to add another kayak 
club list if you want to use our old Majordomo system, as long as the 
list is fairly small (i.e., Paddlewise-size or smaller).  Let me know if 
you're interested.


Michael Daly wrote:

>I'm looking into ways of keeping folks in our kayak club in touch 
>with what's going on.  
>
>For quite a while, our club's had a quarterly newsletter, but 
>increasing the frequency is out of the question.  Since most of our 
>membership have computers, we are exploring getting some kind of 
>email based system.  We'd like to get breaking information to the 
>members quickly.  For example, if a trip comes together but needs 
>another member by the following weekend, waiting for the next 
>newsletter is out of the question.
>
>Right now, we have a web-based BBS, but it is little used and not 
>very good (I'm the moderator and _I_ rarely go there!).  It was 
>supplied by a commercial interest and I'd rather drop it.
>
>I like the idea of a mailing list (a la Paddlewise), but don't know 
>how to set one up and have been told there's a payment issue with 
>majordomo etc. (is this true? - who pays for Paddlewise?)
>
>Our club's web site is on a commercial site with advertising 
>(Geocities), but it can't support anything but read-only web site 
>stuff - no BBS or other things.  We'd have to go to a $$ service to 
>do that.  We have a budget but would like to keep costs down.
>
>Phone networks exist, but they are, and are perceived to be, 
>cliquish.  New members tend to be left out, since no one knows them.
>
>How do folks in your clubs keep in touch?
>
>Mike
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