This experiment

[William Huber]

OK, we've been around for a week or so and have had a chance to see how this site works. What about our experiment? Is this worth continuing? If so, what's the next step? (We'll need to invite a few thousand people to make it successful.) If not, then what did we learn and what useful information can we take back to the RiskAnal listserve (and maybe the SRA blog, too)?

[Tony Cox]

Let's give it some more time. I am usually not much of a joiner, but Steve's post on riskanal prompted me to give this a try. Sure enough, it really was easy!

Best,

-- Tony

[William Huber]

At the bottom of the "Forum" main page you should see this line:

"Notify– Email me when there are new discussions"

Click on the icon to its left.

(I did, a while ago. However, I haven't received any e-mail so far. It might not be getting through my spam filters. Is this working for anybody?)

Steve Brown said:

I know that Ning will send the member an e-mail if a reply has been made to a posting, but is there a way to make it send a notice whenever a new thread is begun?

[Vincent Hand]

I am not finding this to be much different from the RiskAnal Listserve. I have chose to receive notification as an RSS feed, so new posts from Ning arrive in my e-mail much the way they do from RiskAnal. (This may answer the previous question about receiving e-mail.)

The opportunity to post graphics may be an advantage, but so far no one has demonstrated this. Another advantage may be the opportunity to stop receiving notification about specific threads.

Posting, and especially replying to posts, seems more difficult to me, as I have to go to the Ning site to do so, instead of replying directly from an e-mail client (Outlook, e.g.). I also have had one case in which a reply I made via Ning was never posted. Operator error, I think, but still not as convenient.

[Luca Nori]

To me it's a leap ahead. Great idea Bill, I support it wholeheartedly.

I've joined numerous technical and non-technical boards in the internet and this is the easiest way to do it. The old riskanal maillist was akward.

The advantages are many, I can connect from everywhere, I can open only the posts which are interesting to me, no hassle to find the webpage after you memorized it in your browser, cookies will memorize your password as well.

Avatars (your personal pic or representative image) are great and so is the capability to add or link to images.

I'd propose to have more patience, I just heard the news today and hurried to sign up.

I've a new thread to start and I'm going to do it later.

It's soon to judge wether there is enough interest, it should be publicized more maybe, and it should be visible to search engines like google.

Also, great to see you guys (and gals)!

[William Huber]

Thank you for your encouragement, Luca. We are still in an experimental stage so I haven't advertised this site. However, if we reach critical mass--and really, only our members will know when that moment occurs--then we definitely should let our colleagues everywhere know about it. I'm hoping this will be decided one way or the other by the time of the SRA meeting early in December.