daily news mailinglist?

[Robert_Kosten]

Hi,

is it possible to receive all news items via email, preferably on a daily basis? I would consider that far more convenient than looking at the front page every day (and I'm not going to replace /. as my startup page ). Subscribing to the news threads doesn't help here as well, because then one receives notification only, not content, which is fine forum-wise, but not for news...
BTW: The thread subscription seems seriously broken, I was able to subscribe, yet "my subscriptions" remains empty, and I can only unsubscribe via the link provided in the notifications...

 

[Umbran]

is it possible to receive all news items via email, preferably on a daily basis?

As I understand it, the server for this site is already heavily taxed with normal traffic. Sending out e-mail for all the news to every person who wanted it, every day.. well, I think that'd probably be a bit much.

 

[Robert_Kosten]

yahoogroups could solve that...

 

[Umbran]

yahoogroups could solve that...

Maybe, and maybe not. Even if they could, I'm not sure they would appreciate it.

Yahoo Groups are designed for smallish groups of people who dont want to have to pay to communicate. As I understand it, they aren't designed or intended for really big enterprises.

And EN World is an impressive enterprise. Well over 17,000 people registered on the message boards. More than that using the front page for news. This place isn't a quiet little corner. Thousands of folks use it for gaming news and information.

 

[Robert_Kosten]

I do not consider that a good excuse... On the contrary, if a page has so many readers, it is quite unusual not to have a mailinglist, isn't it?

 

[Umbran]

Well, one makes excuses when one does something wrong. Morrus and the admins and mods are all volunteers. They're giving us something for free. Failure to provide even more stuff for free isn't doing a wrong, so there are no excuses.

I don't know if it is unusual to have such a large readership without a mailing list. But I am pretty sure that most sites that get so much traffic are corporate or pay services. EN World is free of charge, not operating for profit, and thus works with more limited resources.

But thinking about it, most of the news web sites I look at don't provide that news by e-mail. I don't think WotC does. Sci-Fi Wire doesn't mail out the full text of all it's news stories. Given that they already have the website to disseminate information, the mailing list would be a bit superfluous. Given that the computing power required would not be trivial, taking a pass on the e-mail makes some sense.

 

[Dimwhit]

I actually think this would be a cool feature to offer to Community Supporters. Another perk. That would probably limit the list to under 1000. And to have people sign up for it, it would probably cut it to under 500. Just guessing, of course. I know I'd like it.

But I also understand the load on the server, so I can see why it's not done. But as an idea for a Community Supporter perk, Morrus et al might want to consider it for after the new server.