Please let me know if you have any comments on the goodness of merging the "boston-lisp-announce@neilvandyke.org" list that I maintain into "boston-lisp@common-lisp.net" list (or perhaps into a "boston-lisp-announce@common-lisp.net" list).
You may wish to email me privately. Any replies will *not* go through to the moderated "boston-lisp-announce" list, anyway.
More info follows...
"boston-lisp-announce" (originally called something else, a bad pun) was intended to reach the largest number of Boston-area Lisp (CL/Scheme/etc.) users, for announcements of things like meetings of Boston-area Lispers, highly relevant talks in the Boston area, and Boston-area job postings involving Lisp.
When I created the list, I had a suspicion that many of the Lispers we most wanted to attract were highly averse to being on email discussion lists, and to spam, so I promised that "boston-lisp-announce" would be very-low-traffic and heavily moderated. I also adopted a policy of no member listing and no message archives, for those people who want to keep a low profile for themself or their startup company, or who just think that might help keep their address away from spammers and headhunters.
When Boston Lisp Meeting started up, I think that "boston-lisp-announce" helped jumpstart participation in that, by reaching a fairly up-to-date and focused list of relevant people. (Around that time, "boston-lisp@common-lisp.net", or wherever it was hosted at the time, was effectively dead, as far as I recall.)
Given that Boston Lisp Meeting announcements have seemed to constitute most of the traffic on "boston-lisp-announce" in recent years, and that "boston-lisp" seems to be the de facto list for post-Fare Boston Lisp Meeting, as well as me realizing that a primo list of Lispers exists nowhere other than my little personal Web site hosting account (the continued existence of which is contingent on me not getting hit by an MBTA bus)... I'm leaning towards talking with the "@common-lisp.net" people about merging "boston-lisp-announce" into their stuff.
I'm asking here on "boston-lisp-announce" first and foremost to see whether there are any objections to merging at this time. I did make some guarantees as to how the list would behave, and I will honor those guarantees unless there are no objections.
Or perhaps people would conditionally accept the idea of moving the list, so long as it becomes "boston-lisp-announce@common-lisp.net" with the same guarantees as "boston-lisp-announce@neilvandyke.org". (I suggest speaking only for your own interest here, not speculating on others', since everyone affected should receive this same message and can speak for themselves.)
I'm CC-ing "boston-lisp" in case anyone there has ideas on how to best handle a currently-hypothetical merging of lists.
All this said, if anyone would like me to continue to host and moderate "boston-lisp-announce@neilvandyke.org", with the same guarantees as always, I am happy to do so. Modulo any unfortunate MBTA incidents.
Thanks, Neil V.