Re: A proposal to bring together the conlang communities

On 27/01/08 11:07:08, Amanda Babcock Furrow wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 26, 2008 at 04:11:41PM -0500, Rick Harrison wrote:
>
> > JPL is not defunct, it's just taking a nap.
> >
> > The invention of the WWW took a bite out of the need for a hardcopy
>
> > journal. Language inventors can write their own lang descriptions
> now
> > and update them 100 times a day if they want. That's considerably
> more
> > attractive to many people than getting fossilized in a hardcopy
> publication.
>
> Actually, I frequently wish for a hardcopy journal (with someone else
>
> doing all the work, of course :)
(Snip)

Hear, hear! (Except that I'm willing to a lot of the work, largely
because I won't read it if it's ugly.)

Also as to the ZBB thing --- I'm wholly against any attempt to merge
the mailing list and web forum. It's not just about the fact that I
prefer email clients over web fourms (and tend to give up on web forums
after a week of not seeing anything interesting, whereas there's weeks
or months when I don't care about conlang, and then start reading
again, just because it's there). Things like replying to other messages
is done completely differently here and there... If some people prefer
web forums, then they would probably generally find all these angle
brackets and quotes superfluous & distracting, and the fact that they
can't use formatting for emphasis limiting.

But I'm absolutely not against any attempt to create a central portal,
or to more closely integrate the community. Isaac Pensev used to post
updates on happenings the different sublists until real life caught up
with him. If someone (or a coordinated group of someones) with copious
free time could do something similar again, and include ZBB and the
other non-sublist community outlets, that might work wonders on its
own.

--
Tristan.