Yahoogroups

So Jason de Rooy made a comment on the first post about Yahoogroups that I thought deserved it's own post:

"Could we do everyone a favour a cull the number of yahoogroups covering Brisbane Ultimate? As most of the existing yahoogroups are quite well behaved and generally have only the LDs posting info, I can't see why we can't just use the one big one.

It took me ages as a newcomer to town (and one who probably had a reasonable idea anyway) to find out all the places I had to go for information.

I think we just need:
1. Qld-Ultimate@yahoogroups(for those major national/ statewide announcements)
2. Brisbane-Ultimate@yahoogroups(for all players in Brisbane - to replace the various League lists)
3. Brisbane-Elite-Ultimate@yahoogroups(for players interested in training and regular tournament play in one form or another)

Various clubs and teams continue to have their own lists."

To which Pottsy added:

"I'm with JdR here. As a newcomer with probably the highest likelihood of being able to find my way around in Brisbane (having grown up here, played here for my first 4 years, played again for a year in 2000, know pretty much all the important people), I found it extremely difficult to find out what is going on.

The calendar on the quda website is good, but it is difficult to find out anything more specific about those events - like who's in charge and how to contact them. At least I found it hard. And how is one supposed to know about all of the stupid email lists one is supposed to join? I've joined a handful now, but I suspect that there are more out there.

Would be great if the email lists were simply hierarchical:
Australia
State
Local

I think Brisbane can manage with one list at the moment and all of the league-specific info can just go out on that. Agree with Jason's naming, although I would make them all lower case as they are email addresses."

What do I (Rueben) think?

I can understand that there are a lot of groups and that it can be confusing to understand which ones to be apart of and what they are for. But I think that is best solved by having a clear description somewhere (on the QUDA webpage?) about what all the groups are and how to join them etc...

I know that when the YUFL Beginner League was running earlier last year John was sending out information to the BUDA list. For those people who weren't playing in that league that got really annoying really quickly and since then John set up a group just for that league which I think works much better.

Looking at the lists I am currently on (that are purely QLD based) I have:
BUDA-Ultimate@yahoogroups.com
Nationals2006_QLD@yahoogroups.com
mixed_booty@yahoogroups.com
dog-cup@yahoogroups.com
qld-ultimate@yahoogroups.com
qld-worlds@yahoogroups.com
YUFL_intermediate@yahoogroups.com.au

while that is a lot, I can see there being an advantage in each League (ie. BPL (dogcup) YUFL etc) having it's own list - so that only people who were playing that league get that league information. The worlds and nationals list could be combined but then you have to consider that the worlds list was for guys and girls and the nationals list was set up just for guys, so again, people would be getting things they didn't need. But possibly a more broad elite "mens" list could be established that is long term to enable people to communicate with those players who are interested in Interstate competition, which also has its own female counterpart (in think they are actually a few 'women only' list going around at the moment anyway).

I think the best thing to do would be to make sure that all the lists are on display somewhere and are clear about what they are for - AND ALSO that all people who are on any list are also on the BUDA list - that way we can stop all this cross posting - if you want to contact everyone in Brisbane, you only have to use the BUDA list. But that may be more difficult then it would seem.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.