Suggesting use of a Forum was RE: People - please do not reply to "everyone".
Jane McGary (Sat, 30 May 2009 10:46:12 PDT)

Justin wrote,

I know everyone does not like this accidental use of the PBS bounce
or email that is 5,000 lines long.
I would like to suggest the use of a Forum to replace much of the
email discussions. Being new to PBS I don't know if a forum has
been tried or not. Leaving the PBS bounce for more important
information to be passed on.
There are many people who only read and do not participate in
discussions and I think that is not good. Lets face it, it is a bit
intimidating for someone who has no technical or scientific
knowledge of bulbs and blooms to send out an email to be read by
very knowledgeable people. I dare say everyone has at least some
little bit of knowledge gained through experience that would be of
interest to all.
We are an organization of hundreds (thousands? i dunno) of people
but yet it is only 8 or 9 people doing most of the sharing of knowledge.

I prefer the e-mail list, because I would not always remember or
bother to go to a website, go through the procedure of signing on
with a password, and sorting through the posts and trying to remember
when I last looked at them. It's no problem for me to get the usually
brief e-mails that come with the PBS list, even though I am condemned
to a slow dial-up connection. I use the index on my "In" box to view
what has come in, and I delete anything whose subject line suggests
it will not be relevant to my interests, along with the obvious spam,
before even displaying it. This is very easy to do with the e-mail
application I use, Eudora; surely it is easy with others.

As for the limited subset of our 400+some members who post, some of
us are more comfortable than others with writing publicly. As a
professional editor and writer, I deplore this: No matter how bad
your writing is, if you know something, people should not criticize
your style, typing, or spelling. That kind of stuff is the job of
people like me. If your job is growing fascinating plants, I don't
care about your English, or indeed any other language you care to
write in -- though I hope it's a language I can read, with apologies
to our Japanese colleagues.

So if you've been lurking out of shyness about writing in public,
come on out. Very few of us are English professors, and the ones who
are will probably be among the most tolerant.

With best regards,
Jane McGary