Pooclub Migration

For six years, pooclub has used yahoogroups for delivering its treasure of daily poomails. Most of the time we have found this to be a good service and have enjoyed the other features that yahoogroups offers (polls, file sharing etc).

However, 2006 has seen a gradual deterioration in the speed at which messages get delivered. Some delays could be over a day, whereas others might be only a few minutes, but either way they got all out of sync and didn't make any sense, or rather in our case didn't make any nonsense. By July 2006, the situation had become intolerable and so the decision was made to up sticks and move somewhere better.

That somewhere better is half-hour.com powered by mailman. It is an extraordinarily fast emailer and so far has proved to be very reliable. Unfortunately, it does not offer all the extra features that yahoogroups does such as polls, filesharing, chat room etc. However, pooclub’s primary purpose is as an emailing group and so it is essential that this feature is paramount. Other services can be found elsewhere, for example the poowiki is a much better means of file sharing than yahoogroups.

Regrettably, we haven’t yet found a practical means of running polls. If we were to continue to use yahoogroups, then closing a poll would only send the results to yahoogroups members which is not what we want. If anyone has any good ideas on how we could run polls, please let us know as this will be essential for Vegetable Of The Year.

To move to the new half-hour mailing list all that pooclubbers had to do was subscribe here:

http://mail.half-hour.com/mailman/listinfo/pooclub_half-hour.com

It was not necessary to unsubscribe from yahoogroups as we have kept our yahoogroups account active so that members will still be able to access the archive of our first six years of messages (over 40, 000 of them!), view the old files and even use the chat room if they feel that way inclined.

Naturally, all new members must subscribe to the new mailing list but it is still possible for them to subscribe to yahoogroups.

Half-hour was used on a trial basis from Monday 17 July and ran in parallel with yahoogroups until Wednesday 26 July when its emailing facility was closed down. Half-hour was officially inaugurated as pooclub's new mailer on Thursday 27 July which by some amazing co-incidence turned out to be pooclub’s sixth birthday!

Naturally, much jubilation ensued, cake was eaten and balloons were put up on the wiki. We apologise if there's still a bit of a mess as there was some unpleasantness regarding who should tidy up.