Backup Central

Before posting to this forum, you need to understand that it is also connected to a mailing list that existed before the forum, and that we must respect that community's wishes. EVERY forum post that you make is immediately sent to that mailing list as an email. Messages that include no context may make sense on a threaded forum, but make no sense to an email user that can't easily see the previous message to which you are replying.

Therefore, when replying to another post (including your own), YOU MUST INCLUDE the relevant parts of the post to which you are replying in quotes. That way, when someone is following on the mailing list, they won't get an email that says "Here's what you can do about that?" without having any idea what "that" is.

The easiest way to do this is to use your mouse to select the appropriate amount of text needed for context, then right click and select "Copy." Paste that message into your forum post as the first paragraph or two. THEN SELECT THE PASTED TEXT AGAIN and click the "Quote" button just below the title of your post. That will place the "Quote" and "End Quote" codes around your text, causing it to show up as a quote in the forum post and in the email to the mailing list.

Your assistance in this is greatly appreciated.

I apologize for my late response to this thread. I've been on the road
constantly for two weeks and didn't see Richard's message.

Richard Sims said:

Sorry, Preston, but your presumption to impose this "requirement" on
ADSM-L members is bogus.

<sigh>

You obviously didn't read the post to which you are responding. It doesn't
even appear that you even read the first SENTENCE:

"Before posting to this forum, you need to understand that it is also
connected to a mailing list that existed before the forum, and that we must
respect that community's wishes."

I'm giving the ADSM-L mailing list props and telling the forum folks that
they need to respect the wishes of its community. I've received two types
of complaints since starting this: spam and non-threaded posts. I addressed
the spam issue, and am trying to work on the threading issue, but it's an
open-source team in three different countries, and I am only one customer of
a tool used by thousands of websites, so it's slow going.

In the meantime, I'm asking people who reply to forum postings to include
some of the relevant text in their post. I couldn't imagine how you could
object to that, but you did:

there is NO need in a threaded discussion to voluminously include all past
elements of the discussion, as a mounting accumulation. That's
redundant, wastes Internet bandwidth, and is an untoward imposition on
Marist's disk space in hosting this mailing list (at their expense).

Again you're showing me that you didn't read the post. I asked them only to
"select the appropriate amount of text needed for context." The funny
thing is that what I have suggested that they do will send far less
extraneous text than what YOU did, which was to top post and put my entire
message after yours. Still others replied to your message, which contained
message, with THEIR message. Can you step off the soapbox for a minute and
see that maybe I'm trying to HELP here?

Your choice to feed ADSM-L postings to your income-producing
commercial site

Now you have definitely have no idea what you're talking about. I pay for
this server to be hosted out of my own pocket, and have done so for 11 years
now without asking for a single dime from anyone using the site. Within the
last year, I was hit by the recession as much as everyone else (I was laid
off and now working part-time) and am doing everything I can to make ends
meet, so I have been experimenting with ads just to get the site to pay for
itself. I tried Google ads for a year or so, and am now trying something
else. Only once or twice in the last couple of years has ad revenue
exceeded my server bill, so how about dropping the "income-producing
commercial site" comments, will you?

What you need to do is finally address the deficiencies of your site
by embarking upon the Web development to organize incoming postings by
thread, as other ADSM-L archiving sites do (adsm.org,
www.mail->archive.com/adsm-l < at > vm.marist.edu

If you would bother taking a look at my site's TSM forum, you would see that
I organize incoming posts into threads just fine, thank you. I would argue
that it does it better than any email archiving system I've seen, and
certainly makes searching the postings easier. The problem occurs when I am
sending forum postings to the mailing list, and I am indeed working on that,
as I previously stated. But such a big project takes time.

I could do what ADSM.ORG did and create another forum that doesn't have
anything to do with the mailing list, but I felt that this would split the
community, or at the very least require people to watch yet another place
for questions and answers. I think all users of a given tool (in this cae
TSM) should have one place where they can go to ask their questions. The
list has been there for far longer than the ADSM.org forum, and I think that
the "one place" should be that list. But there are people that prefer the
forum style of communicating, so I found this interface that would connect
the two.

I'm just a guy trying to help people do backup.

Preston,

I'll briefly reply to response to try to make clear the the overall
problem, which you don't want to acknowledge...

The plain fact is that you are running a commercial site, which is
apparent to anyone who has visited Backup Central and seen the banner
and sidebar sponsored links, including the one offering "Place your ad
in this space: Backup Central can help you reach 1000s of new
customers". And your site links itself to non-commercial mailing
lists, such as ADSM-L - but in such a way that when a posting of any
kind is made in a forum on your site, it gets distributed to the many
hundreds of people on the unsuspecting mailing list proper. Your
response to the issue is not that clear, but apparently you are now
saying that the message that you sent to some 1600 ADSM-L members
about proper posting behavior was intended only for your site's users,
but that in the absence of an administrative communication vehicle in
the design of your site, it went out beyond your site to the full
external mailing list. Worse, it was poorly formulated, with no
addressing preamble such as "To Backup Central participants using the
TSM forum:". Without any audience distinction, the 1600 recipients on
ADSM-L were left to believe that the missive was addressed at their
manner of participation in ADSM-L. And, of course, the great irony is
that your June 2nd message addressing the inclusion of proper
contextual information so as to make messages clear was itself without
context.

You're obviously busy, but it's simply irresponsible to cross-link
from your site to large population user groups without attentive
administration. You seem to be the only one actually running Backup
Central, and you are sometimes away from it for weeks, as you say.
That combination just doesn't work. The magnitude of the problem
resulting from the site design deficiencies and lack of attention is
certainly evidence of that. It would have been nice if you had taken
the magnanimous step of apologizing to the membership of ADSM-L for
the mis-communication; but instead your choice was to blame an
individual messenger.

I would strongly advise that you sever the link between your site and
external mailing lists at least until the manifest problem of intra-
site communication can be fixed within Backup Central, so as to avoid
incidents as occurred at the beginning of this month. It is also
problematic for Backup Central to be pipelined to external forums if
Backup Central is essentially running unattended, with no one to
perceive or respond to problems.

What I'm asking is that you respect the right that ADSM-L members have
to pursue matters within the realm of the mailing list they joined,
without intrusion and disruption from external sources.

Richard Sims

I apologize for the ambiguity in the message that started this whole thing,
and I agree that it is ironic that it was missing context. I also
apologize for such a personal and negative message, but please allow me
explain. The reason I responded so negatively to you was that I read and
re-read the message that started this whole thing several things and I
honestly couldn't see how someone that read the whole thing could interpret
it the way you did. (It talked about forum-specific buttons and functions,
for example.) It appeared to me that you didn't read the whole message and
were attacking me without reason. In retrospect, messages that negative
never seem to do anything but tick people off, so what can I say. I'm
human.

The other ironic thing is that I DO have the ability to just send messages
to the forum, but allowed this message to go to the list because I thought
that the list would appreciate seeing the effort I was making at helping to
make things flow better. So there is no "problem with intra-site
communication."

I also never said that backup central or this forum/mailing list goes
unattended for weeks (or even days) at a time. I'm on it all day every day.
What I said was that I didn't see that this particular thread had responses
to it, as I wasn't looking for them. (Stickies don't typically get
responses.) I'm on the site every single day even when I'm on vacation, as
I'm that big of a geek, and I have help that I can call on when I need it.
AND my email address goes out in every single message that goes from the
forum to the list, and anyone contacting me via that address would reach my
BlackBerry immediately. So I don't believe that I'm being irresponsible.

As to the whole "commercial site" thing and whether or not I'm doing
something that nobody wants here, I remind you that this topic has come up a
few times over the last two years that I've been doing this, and the overall
opinion (with a few exceptions from people like yourself) was that as long
as I was adding value and not sending spam, then it would be OK. Every once
in a while there is a message that sets off the debate again, and when it
does I remind people of WHY I'm doing this and the value that it is
bringing.

Toward that end I did some queries of the posts from the last six months.
Of the 2510 posts to this mailing list, 168 of them came from the forum
(~6%). I then took a look at who was posting and can see that of those 168
posts, 131 of them were from 10 people. This shows me that while there are
a few "one-time posters," the bulk of messages coming from the forum are
from people that are actively involved with the community. This also shows
me that some active participants of this community prefer the forum
interface (some of which are IBM employees, BTW). I believe these voices
would be silent if we severed the link. AND I believe there are more like
them out there that find my site every day.

In addition, no spam hit the list during that time, due to the system I put
in place and the care that I have taken.

I do respect the right of people on this list to do what they want, but in
the absence of a dictator (list admin) telling me to just get the heck off,
I've been going with a consensus -- and the consensus seems to be that as
long as I'm adding value and not spam, that the link should stay.

If anyone else would like to discuss this further, I suggest we do it
off-list. There's already been enough messages on this topic.

My email address is curtis < at > backupcentral.com

I apologize again for any inconvenience.