[College of ACES] [University of Illinois] [Illinois CES]

Re: Plant Health Care Listserve is Dead

bobw@enteract.com
Sun, 10 Jan 1999 12:35:44 -0600 (CST)

If you haven't noticed, there is a new ISA board at http://web.aces.uiuc.edu:8080/~isa_WB apparently as a replacement for the old Boards. I say apparently because we've really not been told anything about the change. Just like you, I wrote a number of times before figuring out the forum was closed. The is a new forum with the same name in the new Board, but that is moderated, which is to say they decide what gets printed beforehand. At the present time, I've not seen anything posted there except for a few early insiders. I did write a small congratulatory letter, but it never saw the light of day.

The new replacement forum there with this same forum's name is operating and posting messages, but the format is dramatically different. They do provide a rather extensive help page and the reply page now comes with spell-checking and the ability to see all your text, so it ought to help the quality of the writing. At least we won't have to listen to the pious pedantics insulting people about their poor spelling.

I have mixed feelings. I'm glad we moved from a turkey-lurky program that pre-crippled any authors attempting to write. But, I do think the 3.5 version of this new Board is too bloated and inappropriate for what we would like to do in our conversations with each other. I also anticipate pre-judgments and censorship and other interferences and delays that bureaucracies delight in these days.

Try the above link. You can write in the new tree climber forum and I suspect the tree care forum will be open to us some day. But the least the ISA could have done was to inform the rather large PHC readership of what was going on with the explantion as the last top item on the now closed forum. Personally, I think that forum is so useful and well-attended that it should never be shut down, even temporarily. Then again, who ever listens to us?

Bob Wulkowicz