Hi everyone! As some of you might have heard, C4ES is shutting down forum.electionscience.org (see https://forum.electionscience.org/t/archiving-the-forum-july-30th/697 for details). That makes me sad, because it was a more active venue than this mailing list. This ratchets the pressure back up on me to find a better mailing list solution than Dreamhost's Mailman 2.x (which probably isn't getting ported to Python3 anytime soon). I was actually starting to like using the forum software that C4ES has been use (Discourse.org), and I'm going to miss being able to send plain-text messages while still being able to use **bold** and _italic_ without interspersing my plain text with funky punctuation. But alas, C4ES doesn't want to moderate the forums anymore. This mailing list has always been my personal litmus test for EPOV (Electorama Point of View). Over the past year, I've been calling it "EPOV" (for "electowiki POV"), but that sells y'all short. Who do I mean by "y'all"? I mean the loyal subscribers of the EM-list, some of whom have been here since 1996. We're about to have the 25th anniversary of EM-list, so I want to make sure that you all are part of the discussion as we define what "EPOV" is. "EPOV" is currently defined here: https://electowiki.org/wiki/Electowiki:EPOV You'll notice that the EM-list's perspective seems to have been watered down relative toother forums (e.g. the C4ES forum, or /r/EndFPTP over on reddit). I *was* thinking about asking y'all to join me in the big migration over to the C4ES Discourse.org server, but since that's shutting down, that won't work at all. I have a lot of ideas about how we should modernize our discussions. It seems to me that with lots of CGP Grey videos and plenty of discussion forums out in the world, the last thing that any of us should be doing is building a new piece of forum software. Moreover, there are many complicated reasons why The best place to stay on top of things is on my electowiki journal, available here: <https://electowiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa/Journal> I'm going to try to keep that space up-to-date. You can also follow me on my Miraheze wiki: <https://robla.miraheze.org/wiki/RobLa_journal> Yeah, I did set up a wiki all about me. What are you going to do about it? :-P (other than set up a wiki all about you) Rob p.s. if you hunt around enough, you can find the new Electorama! Quora "space", and other sites where I'm testing out their discussion capabilities p.p.s. I'm almost always camped out on C4ES's Discord server. Discord and Discourse are completely different software, and not to be confused. I'm *reasonably* sure that C4ES doesn't intend to shut down the Discord server, too: https://electionscience.org/discord p.p.p.s. I'm documenting the Discourse dialog here: https://electowiki.org/wiki/Project:C4ES_discourse.org_server

(Whoops, I sent this only to Rob the first time around. Let's try that again...) On 01/07/2020 07.51, Rob Lanphier wrote: > Hi everyone! > > As some of you might have heard, C4ES is shutting down > forum.electionscience.org (see > https://forum.electionscience.org/t/archiving-the-forum-july-30th/697 > for details). That makes me sad, because it was a more active venue > than this mailing list. This ratchets the pressure back up on me to > find a better mailing list solution than Dreamhost's Mailman 2.x > (which probably isn't getting ported to Python3 anytime soon). > > I was actually starting to like using the forum software that C4ES has > been use (Discourse.org), and I'm going to miss being able to send > plain-text messages while still being able to use **bold** and > _italic_ without interspersing my plain text with funky punctuation. > But alas, C4ES doesn't want to moderate the forums anymore. > > This mailing list has always been my personal litmus test for EPOV > (Electorama Point of View). Over the past year, I've been calling it > "EPOV" (for "electowiki POV"), but that sells y'all short. Who do I > mean by "y'all"? I mean the loyal subscribers of the EM-list, some of > whom have been here since 1996. We're about to have the 25th > anniversary of EM-list, so I want to make sure that you all are part > of the discussion as we define what "EPOV" is. > > "EPOV" is currently defined here: > https://electowiki.org/wiki/Electowiki:EPOV > > You'll notice that the EM-list's perspective seems to have been > watered down relative toother forums (e.g. the C4ES forum, or > /r/EndFPTP over on reddit). I *was* thinking about asking y'all to > join me in the big migration over to the C4ES Discourse.org server, > but since that's shutting down, that won't work at all. I think there's still a place for EM as a sort of improvisational research list. Granted, that's probably because that's what I've seen it as -- I haven't got any published papers to my name, but I can still ask e.g. how one may prove that a method definitely isn't summable over every possible way that one may make precinct subtotals. The more established advocacy groups have their own lists or forums. But perhaps new groups will grow from here, too, before they become established enough to create their own forums. (If there's any "established" advocacy direction to EM itself, I have the feeling it is Condorcet. But there are so many varieties of Condorcet! And it's not a particularly *strong* advocacy slant.) > I have a lot of ideas about how we should modernize our discussions. > It seems to me that with lots of CGP Grey videos and plenty of > discussion forums out in the world, the last thing that any of us > should be doing is building a new piece of forum software. Moreover, > there are many complicated reasons why It seems like that sentence got cut off. Complicated reasons why what? :-) In any case, I'd prefer whatever it is the more modern forum becomes to also have mailing list support. It would make it easier to move it over, and keep the general threading format which I think is a good idea. As far as I know, Discourse is more linear than threaded; is that right?