Here's the poll results. There is a clear preference to move the discussion to a listserv. This would be moderated by the society. We will keep the jobs and events here as they are working well.

I will investigate the options, the suggestions so far are JISCmail (although we don't meet their UK criteria), UNSW and ListServe.com. Other suggestions are welcome. Please also let me know if you've had a good or bad experience with a particular listserv.

The first thing to check is whether these services are blocked by government agencies as that would exclude too many members to be a viable option. Another option is developing our own service using R, although that would require more set up costs (and a bit of a delay) but would allow us more flexibility and ability to change over time. For example, we could automatically block the annoying "unsubscribe" messages.

Thanks for all your time and input.

Regards,

Adrian

There are options also to get a daily summary e-mail from the channels and even for the posts. I signed up to all of the channel ones and so can pretty much see where the activity is without even needing to log in. Admittedly I would like a feed of topics (like RSS) but those are hard to delete posts from.

Looking back at the old list, there were times that it was mostly just Society Events and Job Postings, so I do not think this is going to be any different.

Marie-Louise Rankin wrote:

In answer to Chris Howden's question of whether or not someone has to be a member of SSA to be able to post on the discussion forum, the answer is yes and no. When the forum was launched we created a new "membership" type: ANZSTAT Discussion Forum Subscriber, which is free. We had to do this because otherwise people would have been able to post anonymously, which we didn't want.  Our forum moderator checks each new subscription and removes anything that looks dubious, to prevent spammers from creating accounts and posting their rubbish.

We currently have 666 discussion forum subscribers.  Add the SSA membership to that, and you'll have just over 1600 people with access to the forum should they wish to post.  Anyone can read along.

Thanks Marie-Lourise, 

That sounds like a very sensible solution!

Afternoon all,

As a few others have noted. It seems the people hosting the original list no longer wanted to, so a change was required. So thankyou to those who worked on implementing that. Unfortunately though, as shown by the poor update, the current platform simply isn't working.

I felt that the original list was an important part of our community. As a junior statistician I lurked for years leaning about both statistics, and the characters that made up my profession.  People who think statisticians are boring clearly don’t know many!!!

I quite like how this new platform organises threads, much easier to find one. So that would be a nice function to keep.

The key problems do seem to be the inability to receive and reply to posts in real time and by email. Fix them and I think we're good to go. 

Another potential problem is: does this new platform restrict users to being SSAI members? If so, is this what we want or would we prefer a forum that allows for a wider set of views and discussion? One of the things I liked about the original forum is that we did get to hear from people who weren’t card carrying statisticians, but did work with data. Personally I couldn't afford to be a SSAI member when I first joined ANZSTAT, however it was one of the reasons I am now a member!!

In terms of how and by whom it should be moderated, and problems with some contributors on the old list. I agree with David that the problem is not the platform as such, it’s the contributors. Whatever moderation is used in our new forum to fix these problems could have been applied to the original forum.

Perhaps we could start by recognising that we are a broad church with diverse ages and cultures, and allow the forum to largely moderate itself. We are all adults and can surely handle the occasional email that makes us, personally, uncomfortable (which certainly happened to me). Perhaps a good way to work is that if it gets too much then sing out or tune out! I can think of quite a few occasions where this worked quite well, with some debate about the appropriateness of the post being had between members. And in many cases the original poster often apologising and moderating their behaviour.

(The exception of course being threatening language, harassment, or clearly inappropriate posting such as spam. But this happened very rarely).

So thankyou SSAI for taking this on, and I look forward to seeing this important community revitalised at some point in the future :)

In response to "My experience with the old anzstat list was that there were occasions when it did not feel welcoming or respectful to me."

I agree with the sentiment here, but I also would like to pick up on an important detail: it was not the mailing list that wasn't welcoming or respectful, it was the people who contributed to it. In my view there were some people/posts who were very unwelcoming and disrespectful, but it was those people, not the mailing list. The mailing list was just the forum in which they did it. If there is a version of that mailing list that can be moderated in some (probably fairly low level) way then do we end up with a broadly agreeable system and some mechanism for protecting against disrespectful etc contributions/contributors?

The change does seem to have hugely reduced the traffic. I was under the impression that there were other reasons for the old list being closed down too; but using this issue as a justification for that seems to me like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.