> I am not looking forward to the day when I have to wade through multiple
> postings to sci.agriculture.beekeeping to find what little educating
> information may be contained therein.  EVERYONE in cyberspace will have
> instant access!  Postings WILL range from very knowledgeable posts, to
> "bees attacking my hotdogs".  Serious netters will find that the
> increased "accessibility" will generate a great deal of non-informative
> chatter.
 
Remember, the proposal is NOT to replace or get rid of BEE-L.  You can
continue to read BEE-L and you can choose to read or ignore the newsgroup
if it gets created.
 
The newsgroup is likely to _increase_ the quality of BEE-L, since troublemakers
are likely to cause trouble in the newsgroup and not here.  But troublemakers
aren't likely to be a problem (there may be some noise at first only because
it's a new group - *most* new groups get noise at first and then settle
down as people who aren't truely interested drop out)  Also, should we so
choose, we can redirect BEE-L to "A Discussion of Bee Biology" like the
charter reads, and redirect beekeeping questions to the group.  If we choose.
And certainly if a truely good post shows up only in the newsgroup, someone
will probably repost it to BEE-L so everyone sees it.
 
> There is a LISTSERV option individual subscribers can set to have a
> daily digest of the BEE-L sent rather than individual postings.
>               TELL LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1 SET BEE-L DIGEST
> or send mail to LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1 with one line saying
>               SET BEE-L DIGEST
> Setting this option does wonders for relieving cluttered mailboxes.
 
That only decreases the number of messages.  The total number of kilobytes/day
is unchanged, and you still have to wade through all the messages to find
ones of interest.
 
> > "And "Malibu Skipper" et.al. maybe will periodically disrupt *them*
> >  and not the bee list!
>
> I suspect that the "Malibu Skipper's" of the networld will disrupt
> sci.ag.beekeeping AND BEE-L rather than keeping the mischief to USENET.
 
Only the truely dedicated troublemakers will do so.  Most will stop at the
newsgroup.
 
> And by virtue of it's location, sci.ag.beekeeping will inherently have
> MORE Malibu Skippers, and if they don't blat to BEE-L directly, I
> suspect that any ruckus on sci.ag.beekeeping will spill over to BEE-L.
 
But in a newsgroup you can killfile them.  In fact, once a "Malibu Skipper"
shows up, I can set things up so I NEVER see any post from them ever again,
and junk replies to those posts too.
 
-Mike