Deep Select

There is a huge number of support forums for MySQL, such as MySQL's Forums, and hundreds more for regional, language and application specific discussion.

However, the MySQL group on Yahoo seems to be abandoned. This is quite a shame, because the group often peaked more than 3000 messages per month and the archive has thousands of messages. A search for PHP returns more than 5000 messages. Anyhow, I asked Yahoo's support what could be done to re-activate this forum. Actually, its quite simple: its done democratically:

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Groups.

I can understand your concern with the mysql group. Due to our Privacy Policy, we cannot appoint a new owner to the group. If the owner cannot be contacted, one alternative is for you to create your own group and send out invitations to those people who you would like to join your new group.

Since the group currently has no active moderator, it may be possible for us to appoint a moderator to manage the group.

If you would like a new moderator for the group, please join the group and start a poll listing a few members, who would like to be a moderator, as choices for the poll. Please announce the poll to your group and ask the members to vote on who they would like to be moderator. Once the poll has closed, please email me back and I will appoint the "elected" moderator.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

We can do this in steps:

• Step 1: Create a poll to find people interested in moderating.
• Step 2: Create a poll for group members to choose their favorite moderator.
• Step 3: Get Yahoo to appoint the moderator.
• Step 4: Due to the previous high volume of the group and the increase in spam, it would be prudent if the appointed moderator assigned others to help.

Step 1 is already in progress. This poll will be closed in a week or so, after I return from a consulting engagement. I'll step forward only if no-one else wants role.

So, how would you like to moderate or help moderate a forum that could exceed 100 messages per day?

# posted by Dean Swift @ 6:32 pm