DO YOU YAHOO? By List Master, MSgt Jim Peringer, USMC (Ret) Our Discussion List is always evolving and striving to find better ways to serve our subscribers. In the past year we have seen a big jump in the participation both from active duty CI Marines discussing current issues in the field as well as more of the retired/former folks coming on line and bringing with them a vast pool of experiences and historical perspectives. We’ve seen some excellent questions asked resulting in valuable experiences being passed on from other list members and much of our informal “spoken history” is being delivered to the list every day. Some of these discussions and lessons learned have even impacted on the training our new Marines are receiving at NMITC. In addition to pertinent current events, some of the recent discussions have included the merger of the CI and IT MOSs, POW/MIA experiences and issues to name just a few. Perhaps just as important, list members have a vehicle in which to keep in touch on a regular basis. There is a fair amount of bantering going on everyday, which helps keep our brotherhood intact. Now about this Yahoo thing, there has been a major makeover |
of the Association’s new and user-friendlier discussion list. We’ve moved from a majordomo-based program at DataBack to the Yahoo Groups format. This change in servers (ISP) should open the door for many CI Marines who could not subscribe to the old list because of the high volume of messages, which prevented or discouraged them from participating. On the new list a subscriber has three methods to receive list email. You can receive the mail as it is sent (gets pretty busy when we’ve got something hot being discussed); you can elect to receive a digest version (one message every 24 hours containing all the traffic for the previous day; or you can elect to not receive any email, but have the ability to read all the messages on the list web page any time it’s convenient. Since you can change your own settings anytime you want the folks traveling or are away can reset the way they receive to “no email” so that they don’t have a mailbox full when they get back, but can go to the web page and read all the traffic posted while they were off line. They can then also reset the method of getting the mail themselves which takes a big load off of having the list master subscribing and unsubscribing folks all the time. Once onboard you have full control on your incoming email from the list. |
Additional features are instant messaging which allows a live conversation with others on the list. You can also use the voice feature and talk back and forth just like using the telephone as well as create a chat room so that several can get into a live discussion. This is handy for our Board of Directors to hold meetings on line. We also have the ability to send large files as attachments to the emails. This has allowed sending photos, maps and etc. There are many additional features available on this new format, but we’re holding most of them back just now until folks get a good handle on the basics. Want to sign up? Just send your request to mccia-listmaster@mccia.org asking that the list master send you an invitation to join the list." Take a look at the list web page at: http://groups.yahoo.com/ which should not be confused with this site (http://mccia.org/) Jim#2 |