I'm not going to quote from anyone's message but to just give a few
thoughts of my own. This will be quite long and if you get bored just
scroll down to the last couple of paragraphs where I have made a
positive suggestion.
URG is a child of its time. It's like the Fidonet which was the first
worldwide general means of electronic communication. The Fidonet died
because a better means of communication grew up, i.e. the Internet. The
Fidonet is still there, and people, mainly Russians, are still writing
software for it, but it is peopled now solely by those who want to keep
a museum piece going.
There were many reasons why people thought the Fidonet was dying, not
least some of the reasons which could be applied to URG.
So how is URG perceived by, say, the newcomer? Some of our biggest
mistakes are, for example, to criticise them for (a) coming to us via
Gardenbanter, or (b) calling URG a forum. Why is it necessary to do
this? By satisfying our own little perception of what URG is, the
newcomer will immediately feel that they are entering a place where they
must mind their P's and Q's. These things may irritate us but is it
necessary to say anything? What good does it do apart from making us
feel that we are "keeping up the standards"? Goodness, how petty!
Why can't we refer to URG as a forum because that's what it is, a place
where discussions can take place. Why shouldn't people use Gardenbanter
to post? Why do we refer to Gardenbanter as "stealing" our messages
where we should be grateful that it is making our messages available to
a wider public. What actual harm is Gardenbanter doing? None! So why
mention it?
Another thing which people say caused the demise of the Fidonet are the
flame wars. There are those who perceive that they are being insulted
and immediately respond, sometimes quite rudely. Most of us haven't a
clue what it was originally about but, by responding publicly, they have
made sure that a lot more people know that there is bad feeling. Here
again, the newcomer will be put off.
I can see why blogs and web sites are becoming more popular. It's
because they are "prettier", with formatting and illustrations. (That's
another reason why the Fidonet died.) In the right hands these can be a
revelation, in the wrong hands they can be even more tedious than a
straight text vehicle. Take the web blog that we had trouble with
recently. I can't help agreeing with a lot of what David Roberts said,
certainly in the context of setting the page out. You'll notice that,
even here, I can try to make my messages more readable by giving some
white space between paragraphs and not making those paragraphs too long.
I'm afraid that Sara simply wrote long blogs with no white space and,
frankly, I lost interest after a time.
But I was a casual reader. An avid reader wouldn't allow such things to
distract them, but how many casual readers have been put off by poor
formatting? It *is* important.
I've been reading URG for around eighteen years, I think. Even when I
started at least one of the stalwarts, Chunky, who helped create URG had
already left - I never saw any messages by him. And Cormaic last only
another five years or so before he found that his business left him too
little time to contribute. But Cormaic was a great encourager. It was he
that persuaded me to post a regular welcome message and he still hosts
the URG web site.
Ok, so we have a URG web site. Why don't we use it? Not much has changed
for years apart from keeping some of the FAQs up-to-date. In fact, it
probably suffers from a lot of the formatting and colour problems that
others have mentioned. It needs a good overhaul. We could keep a blog
going on that. There could be several blogs. Has anyone the vision to
make use of
http://www.u-r-g.co.uk ? URG doesn't *have* to stay as a
Usenet group.
As I said, URG is a child of its time. It's twenty years old (that's an
age in Internet terms!) and it's now time to move on. It needs to
metamorphose into something more up-to-date. Well, how about it, folks?
David
--
David Rance writing from Caversham, Reading, UK