Surviving Hurricane Jo II

[werebearloony]

I have been mulling this over in my head for a few days and I think I 
have finally stumbled upon a fairly good answer for getting through 
Hurricane Jo II safely.  It makes a number of assumptions which I 
hope are right but starts with the idea of new posts to the main list 
going public for the summer (I'll say June- August for the purposes 
of this post).

 This allows people to read the posts without having to join.  In 
addition, I believe going public allows us to use google to search 
instead of fighting with yahoo!mort.

However we would have to make all posts prior to June private in 
order to protect those who posted while this was a private group.  As 
someone pointed out in a thread from awhile ago, which I cannot find, 
we can't just change because things people said in the past were made 
to a private audience and are the intellectual property of the 
author.  They were not approved for distribution to the internet at 
large.  Since we use the archives so much anyway could we not move 
all prior to June posts to an archive accessible only to members and 
then (again I'm assuming we can do this) go to an invitation only 
membership policy.  We would also have to insure that the list knows 
that anything they post after June 1 is going to be (temporarily) in 
view of the general public.  This allows them to protect whatever it 
is they have to say.   Hopefully people would approve of this measure 
in order to keep the list under some semblance of tranquility or 
failing that, give us a decent search engine too plow through the 
haystacks of (exaggerated for my own amusement) `Y didnt hArry c the 
theastals (or whatever theyre called, ya know the hrose thingiges 
thay rode to the Ministry of Magik) at the end of Goblet of fire' 
posts looking for the few needles.

In addition we could encourage readers to email responses they would 
like posted to the author of a post.  This would help spread the load 
around because it would be up to the author of the post to determine 
the quality of the reply and decide whether it is up to par on the 
list.  Hopefully if it is not they could help point the person in the 
right direction.   This would work like (what I understand of) the 
pendings system anyway because every posts from people on moderated 
status has to be approved by the elves.

Finally new people could join but they would have to be invited.  I'd 
say by someone off moderated status (to prevent person K. from 
becoming a listie and inviting her whole address book to join as 
well) and they should be invited after posing a reply that follows 
the rules (through the email system).

To summarize what has been a somewhat rambling post.  My idea is to 
make all new posts to the list this summer public (with the full 
knowledge of the list) in order to prevent too many new members as 
well as to be able to use google to search the public posts.  And to 
allow new members only by invitation after they have had an email 
reply posted by a listie.   Then in September we go back to our 
current system and we have hopefully having weathered Hurricane Jo II 
in relative safety.

~~loony