Hi guys,

I need some strategic advice and direction.  I am the current owner of
Stutt-L, a listserv on "Stuttering Research and Clinical Practice" which is
currently running on the servers at Temple University in Philadelphia.  The
list was formed about 15 (?) years ago by a professor at Temple and the
original members were Temple teachers and students and a few other
academics.  All well and good.  But over the years, the original professor
has retired, he handed the ownership over to me (I live in Dallas, Texas,
and have no connection to Temple) and the list membership has evolved to
about 500 people worldwide and only one person, a grad student, remains at
Temple.

Recently we have had some conflicts with the policies at Temple (which I
understand) and by mutual agreement everyone feels it's time we move off
the Temple servers.  Temple servers should be for Temple people - and
that's too obvious to argue with.  If I was at Temple, that's exactly the
way I would want it too.

My question is:  What do we do now?

As I see it, we have two options that I would be reasonably comfortable with...

      1.  Move to a Yahoo group.

      2.  Move the listserv to another server not at Temple.

I am very comfortable with Yahoo groups (I own about a dozen groups myself)
but I know that many people are uncomfortable with the commercialism of
Yahoo.  There are ads at the bottom of each post and the archives are not
as friendly as a listserv.  But Yahoo groups are FREE if you accept their
ads.  And they DO work fairly well.

I've done the listserv owner's thing at Temple for about six years, so I'm
also comfortable with managing a listserv.  What I am NOT comfortable with
is the technical administration of a list.  My friend Stan Horwitz, a
member of this LstOwn-L group and the listserv administrator at Temple, has
always done the techie things for us.  We upgraded from 1.8d to 1.8e a year
or so ago, and if it weren't for Stan, I'd have been totally lost.  At
least at Yahoo, they handle all the techie aspects of hosting a group.

No doubt there are other options such as MSN groups and other Internet
discussion groups that I am NOT familiar with at all.  So unless there is a
screamingly obvious reason to consider another option, I'd like to limit my
choices to just those two options above.

I want our new home to be free (or at least VERY reasonable because we have
no money) and I don't want to get involved with the internal politics of
other organizations.  I want to be able to sail our own boat in our own
water.  We've had a couple of offers from other universities, but as we are
NOT associated with any university, I don't feel that's the proper thing to
do from an ethical standpoint.

Any thoughts and advice from anyone on this list will be sincerely appreciated.

Thanks,

Russ

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Dallas, Texas
972-881-1451 home, 972-489-6169 cell
My home page: http://www.RussHicks.com
NSA home page: http://www.WeStutter.org