Hi David,

This is excellent feed-back and just what everyone needs to hear.

The Nottingham List is very busy but when you recognize that the whole croquet playing world turn to that particular place for answers to rules, regs, game play, results advertisement of tournament and to chat back and forth it is quite understandable. 

You are not the first to mention the undergrad’ behaviour!  These forums are the cyber equivalent to a bar room and like all bar rooms there are cocktail bars, lounge bars, tap rooms etc  One thing I have learned from subscribing to the Notts. List is that in general people will willingly apologise if they are made to understand that offence has been taken or there has been a genuine misunderstanding.  It can be rather robust certainly.

The format is something of an issue.

Generally people simply hit ‘reply’ and each message becomes tagged to the previous one.

How about we try to set the trend of doing as little as possible of this on our Aus List?

I too believe the Aus List is too quiet I am trying to raise the public awareness of its existence.  30 is a paltry number when you compare it with the number of computer owning players in this Country!

How about someone in every State, or a preferably a few people, or even our State Associations advertise the List’s existence and hand out details of how to join?

We need to get a lot more of the individual club membership, many of whom now have a home computer, to subscribe.  Or maybe the club itself which has a computer capable of being on-line could subscribe.  At the very least someone at each club could take up the responsibility of printing messages and posting them on their club notice board.

The issue of content is another matter – these lists are Open Forums and subscribers must be entitled to freedom of speech.

Strong emotion, misunderstanding and even paranoia are facts of life which while we would like to rid the world of them I doubt the Australian List or Nottingham List is capable of achieving this.

Debate in any forum could always be said to be dominated by a few but currently we do not have debate at all on our own List so one or two of us are going to have to start the ball rolling.

I try very hard to see both sides of any debate and like to give the benefit of any doubt to others who subscribe.  There will always be more listeners than contributors so a small number of subscribers will always be more recognized than others.

 
>I hope the Australian list can grow to the point that it is recognised by
many more people as a worthwhile croquet communication channel.

I could not agree more with the above sentiment from David.

Always remembering OUR List will be whatsoever we make of it.

Regards,

Liz