Everyone was getting along swimmingly in rec.crafts.jewelry on or
about Thu, 14 Oct 2010 09:39:36 -0700 , when Peter W. Rowe
****ed everything up by saying:

On Thu, 14 Oct 2010 09:27:54 -0700, in rec.crafts.jewelry Jessica
wrote:


I do have a question for the group: lately there are fewer and fewer
posts on this group. Are you moving to other sites or groups? I like
this group and hope it will grow.

Not so much moving, but moved.

This group used to be MUCH busier in years past (like ten years ago). But over
the last decade, the Orchid mail list, hosted by the Ganoksin.com web site has
come to pretty much dominate the area of jewelry and jewelry related
discussions. It's by far the most active discussion forum online for people
interested in jewelry, gems, art metal, etc, from professional to hobbyist. That
list currently has well over 10 thousand active subscribers, and gets usually
around 50 new messages per day. I would be surprised if this newsgroup has more
than a dozen or two people who read it on a regular basis at this point.

Some of us read both but as you can see by my time stamps, not too
often.


The big reasons for the move away from this group are that for one, Orchid (has
nothing to do with flowers) is hosted by a web site. People know about the web.
Many newer users of the internet don't even know there IS such a thing as usenet
or newsgroup, much less how to access them. Plus, even knowing that newsgroups
exist, mail lists are easier to access. You subscribe, and they come in email,
which people already have set up. To access a newsgroup, you have to configure
your software to do that, and more than a few people don't know, or won't bother
to do it.

Yeah, only geeks mess with usenet.

Or, alternatively, you access newsgroups via some web service like
Google groups, which isn't ideal. there's a time delay there, it's slow, and
not all types of groups or posts are supported. Plus, for usenet groups,
meaning those that are not specifically unique to Google, there are then extra
steps to jump through to find them, since Google would prefer you read it's
exclusive groups instead of going through them to read the more universal usenet
groups...


Anyway, this group still exists. I still moderate it. But frankly, I've been
doing this for almost 14 years now, and would prefer at this point to find
someone else to moderate the group. Any takers?

Why don't you set it up to moderate itself?
You know, like alt.hackers?

It seems to serve little
purpose at this point other than being there for those few readers who don't
want to bother with the volume of messages on the Orchid list. So don't expect
this group to grow. It's been doing the opposite for some time now.

:-(

Peter Rowe
moderator
rec.crafts.jewelry

noman