Quoting "Cliff Rohrabacher, Esq" :

> Yahoo groups operates just like this list plus it's got photo
hosting.
> I belong to a couple of them one for rocking chairs and one for 
> Felder owners and another for Turbocad files.  There's a 
Festertool
> group  a MiniMax group;  why not one for Old Tools?
>

I would _strongly_ vote against anything connected with Yahoo!!
Historical overview:
In the beginning Tom Bruce and the 4 musketeers got together and 
started the list, hosted by Tom at Cornell and life was good.

Some time later somebody subscribed us to an outfit called findgroups 
and after some discussion we decided we didn't mind the public archive 
instead of the Cornell one, and life was still good.

Findgroups was taken over by egroups (I may have the names reversed) 
and there was a little less explanation of what a listserv was but you 
could still get the faq and life was still ok.

Egroups was taken over by Yahoo and life became very annoying.  The 
group on Yahoo looked like a yahoo group but you still had to subscribe 
at Cornell so the listmoms had continuing questions from people who 
couldn't understand why they couldn't post after they signed up (at 
Yahoo not Cornell),  Yahoo had seriously truncated the previous FAQ and 
didn't include the pointer to it, and either people were missing the 
pointer at the bottom of the message or we weren't doing that yet.  I 
actually went to Yahoo and signed up through them to see what it would 
tell me and the answer was nothing that we expect newcomers to know.

The final straw was when something happened to the fake user they used 
to get the content and their messages all started bouncing, and we 
could not get ANYONE at Yahoo to fix it (ie can't connect to a real 
person to explain the problem, much less do something).  We ditched 
Yahoo and life was again very good.

The Yahoo business model seems to be you give us free content and we 
will advertise.  The further problem is now you have to become a "Yahoo 
user" which I am pretty unwilling to to with anything where I am a 
product to advertisers not a paying customer (why I won't consider 
Facebook etc.)

The remains of the Yahoo version are at 
https://groups.yaho
o.com/neo/groups/oldtools/info, compare their FAQ
with the one linked at the bottom of this message.  There hasn't been 
_that_ much change since then.

My concern is whether Chris is prepared to make this a lifetime 
project. The Usenet group rec.crafts.jewelry went moderated in 1997 to 
cut off the spam mess that made most un-moderated Usenet unuseable, and 
15 years later the moderator was still stuck with it... I tried to 
check it and Google apparently now requires you to join Google to 
access what is supposed to be a free public access group (I doubt the 
library would like me to download a newsreader).

No matter who the host is, my biggest priority is access to a real 
person by the listmom if something goes wrong.  I also second the 
listserv not web-based format.  I have no problem contributing a few 
$$/yr to the cause.

Esther