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In lugnet.loc.uk, simon.robinson@sdxplc.com (Simon Robinson) writes:
> > How could someone possibly find a tiny local group and manage to post to
> > it, yet not realise that there is a main UK group? How could someone
> > thereby come to the false impression that there is no UK LEGO community?
>
> Very easily I'd say - that's happened to me at first. When I was new to
> lugnet one of the first things I did was look for local groups near to me
> - I found the
> section for my part of the UK - I think it was the London list and found it
> was virtually empty. I may have looked at a couple of nearby areas - I can't
> remember as it was a while ago. I found almost no traffic, concluded that
> there couldn't be many UK people on lugnet, and never looked at the local
> lists again for ages. I think the only reason I later on noticed the
> lugnet.loc.uk list was because of a message I read that had been cross-
> posted there and to somewhere I was subscribed to.
OK, so crossposting is one way that people can find the big group from the
smaller groups.
BTW, do you remember why you never bothered to check out the main loc.uk
group initially (don't worry, no one is going to laugh or criticise...just
want data to help get to the bottom of the problem)?
If you could travel back in time, how would you explain to yourself a way to
find and check out the main group?
> The point is, you could easily not notice there is no main UK community/list
> because:
>
> (a) the people who are going to be looking round for this sort of list
> are likely to
> be people fairly new to lugnet. These people will be very unfamiliar with
> the layout of the site - they might not be that familiar with the internet
> as a whole anyway - so they're not going to notice things that are
> blindingly obvious to more experienced users.
They'll be starting at the web pages, right?
> (b) Once you've found a local group, there's no reason to assume that there
> is a country wide group as well, is there!
Unless in order to find a local group you have to first pass through the
country-wide group.
> So you're hardly going to look for one...
> If you see a list for a local group first,
> then you're probably going to think that that's how the groups are arranged.
> Period.
What if the first thing you see is this...
http://www.lugnet.com/loc/uk/
...and in place of the links which appear there today (14 May 1999), you see
snippets of several messages posted by people?
> > If this question has any answer other than "it's not possible," then we
> > have a problem that needs to be solved with some careful thought, so let's
> > first figure out why/how they would miss seeing the main UK group and then
> > let's figure out how to help them find it -- while at the same time making
> > sure that they understand it's still OK to post to a tiny loc group if
> > that's the most appropriate place.
>
> I'd suggest putting some information up on the page that lists all the
> groups - and possibly on the pages that list all the messages in each local
> group.
Would something like this be helpful?--
http://www.lugnet.com/sitemap.cgi?/loc/uk/&d=3
And, would it be even more helpful if it gave you some idea of the relative
sizes of each group?
> I'd have to say for the UK I'd seriously consider just removing all
> the local groups anyway. They may be useful in a couple of years time.
> At the moment, they're not
It's true that they're not being used (much), but that doesn't mean they're
not useful.
It's perfectly OK if the itty bitty loc groups are used only rarely even not
at all; what would be bad is not having them in place ahead of time for the
one or two special time that someone really wants/needs them.
Keep in mind, no one is asked to use the itty bitty local groups exclusively
or even at all, and especially not when using a larger group is more
appropriate.
Here are some examples of cases where the little itty bitty local groups
really shine though. Notice that many of these would probably never have
comfortably seen the light of day in a broad, general-purpose group; many
would have been relegated to (lost in) private email:
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.loc.au.wa.per:74
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.loc.ca.bc.vic:11
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.loc.nl.bn.hdb:26
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.loc.us.co.den:106
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.loc.us.ma.bos:116
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.loc.us.mn.msp:72
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.loc.us.mn.msp:89
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.loc.us.nc.ral:49
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.loc.us.tx.aus:45
And here are also some examples of messages which probably would most
usefully be crossposted between a little group and the main group (some
actually have been, and some haven't been):
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.loc.uk.sc.lo.edb:9
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.loc.us.oh.col:68
http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.loc.us.wi.mil:15
So these examples (above) represent a bit of the flavour of what the little
groups are all about, and someday when enough LEGO people from the UK are
online, these sorts of uses will become more common in the loc.uk.* groups.
BTW, it's interesting (and somewhat puzzling) that the NL folks seem to have
chosen to congregate in 4 different groups...
.loc.nl (96 messages from 13 posters)
.loc.nl.bn.hdb (24 messages from 5 posters)
.loc.nl.ut.utr (16 messages from 6 posters)
.loc.nl.hz.rot (17 messages from 5 posters)
...compared to only 2 for the UK groups...
.loc.uk (691 messages from 49 posters)
.loc.uk.en (53 messages from 12 posters)
(There are a handful of other smaller UK groups with traffic, but they all
have received fewer than 10 messages).
Similarly, 99% of the AU and NZ traffic is in a single group:
.loc.nz (55 messages from 9 posters)
.loc.au.wa.per (73 messages from 9 posters)
but whereas it's country-wide in NZ, it's all city-based in AU.
This is fascinating.
In Canada, 99% of the traffic happens in these 5 groups:
.loc.ca (72 messages from 22 posters)
.loc.ca.on.tor (36 messages from 10 posters)
.loc.ca.bc.vic (32 messages from 7 posters)
.loc.ca.bc.van (30 messages from 9 posters)
.loc.ca.ab.edm (13 messages from 5 posters)
BTW, in all of the tallies above, the initial 2 "welcome to..." posts have
been removed from the tallies -- so it's counting actual postings.
> - though it was a nice thought having them there. (Someone - Todd,
> I assume, must have spent ages going through a map of the UK to find out
> all the places - which is quite impressive) :)
Yeah, it took about a week (last summer) to plan out all of the loc groups
for all the major Internet-connected countries. Most of the grueling
gruntwork was making sure that we had the localised spellings (and accent
characters) correct in the names, as well as the administrative divisions
and their respective abbreviations (whenever they were officially available
online).
--Todd
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Message has 2 Replies:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: All UK Groups subscribed?
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| (...) Very easily I'd say - that's happened to me at first. When I was new to lugnet one of the first things I did was look for local groups near to me - I found the section for my part of the UK - I think it was the London list and found it was (...) (26 years ago, 13-May-99, to lugnet.loc.uk, lugnet.admin.general)
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