Re: A proposal to bring together the conlang communities

On Jan 26, 2008 12:00 AM, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:
> Right now, the conlang community as a whole is split up into many separate fora.
>
> To list only some of them (and in no particular order), there are:
> Lists etc: CONLANG-L, AUXLANG-L, LOJBAN-L, yahoo elfling,
and Usenet's alt.language.artificial.

> Media: Tower of Babel, conlanger.com journal, model languages
> newsletter (all defunct)
Also the Journal of Planned Languages (Rick Harrison)
and the Journal of Unnecessary Languages (Steve Brewer),
also defunct.


> Now, I can fully understand that in some cases this has been necessary
> from the perspective of keeping discussion topical and to keep people
> from butting heads too much (auxlang evangelism comes to mind as one
> very easy flamewar-starter). I can also completely understand the
> different utility, and mood, created by different fora types.
>
> However, it seems to me that this degree of splitting is both
> technically and socially suboptimal.
Most of the fora you mentioned are specialized enough that
their continued existence makes perfect sense.  But the only
reason I can see for having four different general-purpose
conlang fora (CONLANG-L, ZBB, CBB, and LJ-conlangs)
is that different people are comfortable with different interfaces.
Some people prefer mailing lists, some prefer web BBSs,
and of the latter some prefer the phpBB interface and some
the LJ interface (or they already have a LJ account for other
purposes and want to use that instead of signing up for a new
account at ZBB, conlanger.com, or listserv.brown.edu).
Maybe it would be nice to turn CONLANG-L into a mailing
list interface for ZBB, for instance, or ZBB into a phpBB
interface for CONLANG-L... but doesn't ZBB throw away most
messages after a certain amount of time?  CONLANG preserves
messages in the archives (both at brown.edu and conlang.info)
indefinitely.

On the other hand, merging them all (if you could navigate
the political problems and the technical problems of doing so)
would probably create a forum that's so high-traffic nobody
could keep up with it.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry

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