A List, A Year, A Look Back

Lists seem to be my topic-of-the-moment, but this is about a different kind of list.  It’s hard to believe this, but it was a year ago today that the mailing list css-discuss was launched.  By my slightly rough count, the list carried 17,455 messages to its subscribers in calendar year 2002, and has nearly reached 19,000 messages total.  Just over one thousand of those messages were sent in the first eight days alone, which sent a lot of early subscribers running away in horror, and caused me to wonder if I was going to be crushed by the flood.  Due to overloading problems, we had to switch servers twice before finally migrating to the current home, graciously provided to us by evolt UK.  The list averages about fifty messages per day, both at present and as a lifetime average,.  Even though we moved the list to a new server and required people to actively re-join the list at that time, it has nearly 1,500 subscribed accounts.

I’ve worked hard to keep it a practical list with a high degree of signal, and I’d like to think those efforts have paid off.  We have the occasional hiccup, and every now and again a thread gets out of hand, but overall I think the list has been a lot more worthy than not.

I’d like to extend my deepest thanks to John Allsopp of Western Civilisation, which provided the list its first home; to John Handelaar of Userfrenzy and evolt UK, who manages the server where the list now resides; and to all the members of the css-discuss community, who make it useful through their contributions, discussions, and continued respect for one another and the list itself.  No community can be truly great without active support from its members, and the members of that list are very active in making it the kind of place I’d hoped it would be.  My thanks to you, one and all.

• A List, A Year, A Look Back was published on Friday, January 24th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
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