Hi Matt,
 Thanks for your response. Having been subjected to a form of the backbone 
being down to me for most of the last three months, due to the hub being 
down, the feed being down, the home system being down, the one inbetween 
being down, Fido is getting downright frustrating., Then with the move of 
many of us off to Internet land, many of whom I'm just now running into and 
some of them have lamented not being able to access Fidonet any longer was 
the main reasons to consider alternatives for all of us to remain tied 
together. Althoguh we have some terrific people in here, we have lost a bunch 
for whatever reason, local BBS going down or charging too much for percieved 
value, being that it is an "amateur" network, everyone always has a built in 
excuse for poor service.
And while I've stated a number of times that *I* don't intend to drop the 
echo, it has been effectively done for me for most of the last few months 
where I couldn't get access to the echo for weeks at a time .This is BS.
An intolerable situation to an echo junky like me and to some of you who 
check here daily to see what's up.
This has led me to consider an alternative connection to the echo through the 
Internet, either in a form of a maillist of individual messages, or a 
journal, a moderated echo, or some other option that we haven't discussed 
yet. Everyone seems to agree that an unmoderated newsgroup would be just more 
of the same
stuff.
I'm  taking all of these comments under advisement. Thanks all for
contributing your ideas, comments, etc. to this discussion., It looks like I 
may have to set a small BBS back up to do the porting of things back and 
forth. I'm invsetigating the software and scripting that will be needed to 
get each of these solutions going.
More on this later!
 Bonnie Goodwin
 Moderator - AUDIO
P.S. Unless someone else has a terrific idea that hasn't already been talked 
about, let's get back to AUDIO!
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