Well, I've been playing with Google Groups and to tell the truth, I'm not so sure that it offers significant advantages over what we already have available within SCIY itself. Here are some of my early impressions of GG:

• Contrary to my expectation, it's not possible to edit previously posted messages. The Google Groups message lists are very similar to BlogHarbor's comment list. E.g., GG messages are not editable by either the Forum Manager or the original poster, but are deleteable by either.

• GG's threading functions seems at least as confusing as BH's, perhaps even more so.

• There's a short (~ 1-minute) but somewhat irritating delay for a newly posted message to appear.

• If we consider GG messages to be similar to BH's comments, then GG's 'Topics' are analagous to BH's 'Articles.' But GG's Topics don't seem to be editable! And there's really no analogy on GG to BH's Catagories, Topics, & Subtopics folders.

I'll add more impressions as they come.

Hi Rich,

You know, the more I use Google Groups, the more I realize how sophisticated BH is. For example, the whole question of how to deal with articles that have flurries of commenting activity may actually be a non-problem.

All we'd have to do in those cases is to simply post a new *Article(s)* to the relevant topic(s) or subtopic(s), and title it (them) to reflect the most active threads in the comments to the prior article. The comments could then continue under these new articles.

And the new article(s) would appear at the top of the most recent articles list on the Main Page and/or within the relevant Topics. We could even use this technique to revive moribund topics.

And BH Articles are all editable by their posters, the BH Admin, and any Hosts or Moderators we designate for the article's topic.

And we can use the keyword function for another fractal cut through the BH database of articles and comments.

Plus there's the BH search function.

All this is significantly more flexible than either the GG or even the WELL conferencing system.

Hmmm ...

Your thoughts?

~ ron

Ron

I will have to probe more indepth with google groups as Ravi and I have been exploring forum options since for an open discussion on many topics we still feel the forum format is the easiest for organization, of which one of the best appears to be an open source system with a link below

http://www.phpbb.com/

if you click on styles it shows the way the discussions can be set up.

rich