ANNOUNCEMENT: Community discussions will be web-only after 2/20/09.

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wallace winfrey

In a little over a week's time, all of Cycling 74's community
discussions will be web-only. On Friday, February 20, 2009, we will
be shutting off all of our public, two-way mailing lists. This includes:

dev@cycling74.com
java-dev@cycling74.com
javascript-dev@cycling74.com
jitter@cycling74.com
jitter-dev@cycling74.com
maxmsp@cycling74.com
pluggo@cycling74.com
radial@cycling74.com

In order to participate in our discussions, you will need to use our
web forums, located at https://cycling74.com/forums/index.php

Additionally, ending our public mailing lists will correspond with an
upgrade to our forum software, which we hope will offer greater stability and
useful features, such as post editing.

We understand that some of you may be upset by this decision.
However, know that this decision was not something we took lightly,
nor was it hastily decided. The fact is, the mailing lists have had
a sell-by date since we started the forums. The reason they lasted so
long, and that we went through the trouble of tying them to our forums,
is because we realize how fond of them many of you are.

We have two primary reasons for ending the mailing lists, which basically
boil down to:

1. The difficulty of synchronizing the forums and mailing lists, from both
technical and cultural perspectives, has compromised the user experience.

2. The ease with which public mailing lists can be targeted by
spammers. With hundreds of thousands of messages per day being sent to
our mailing lists, fighting spam has become far too time-consuming and
expensive for us to support.

Some of you may say "well, I don't want to browse the forums - I
like having the list come into my mailbox" and for those of you, have you
considered RSS? We have RSS feeds for each of the forums. Here are their URLs:

We also have a beta version of the RSS feeds that include a couple of minor
improvements, such as a link to reply to the post, which was implemented
specifically for folks switching to RSS from the mailing list. If you save
your login on the forums, this will allow you to immediately reply to the topic
at hand, rather than requiring you to login, navigate to the forum thread and
find the "post" link.

You can access the beta version by simply taking the above URL, and adding
substituting "atom-test.php" for "atom.php".

Note, the feeds are quite customizable, if you haven't taken a look at

you'll find that the customizable options include,

* pulling feeds not just for certain forums, as listed above, but also by category & topic
* number of messages retrieved
* date cutoffs
* date ordering

It might take a period of initial adjustment, but I think many of you will
find that RSS feeds feel very similar to the mailing lists.

It's also worth mentioning that, although we won't officially support it, there
are RSS->email services out there that would be capable of pulling our feeds
into your mailboxes.

If you receive any of our mailing lists, your last e-mail will be
sent on February 20. This will contain a reminder that the mailing
lists will be ending. After that, we sincerely hope you'll continue to
participate in our community either via our web site or RSS.