WHIRL email list

To subscribe to the current iteration of the WHIRL email list, write to: whirl-join at-the-domain bilton.us. (Make sure to write to whirl-join and not simply to whirl.) A request for approval will be generated. You need no subject nor message as that will be ignored. Alternatively, you can visit this page and subscribe from there.

A bit of list history:

I started the WHIRL list back around 1994 shortly after getting my recumbent, which I still have, unlike most folks who seem to have gone through many bikes. The list began as just a list of cc'd email addresses. At some point maybe in 1995, I thought it would be nice to have a "proper" mailing list and decided to create one through the website cycling.org. I forget whether I just did this on my own or asked for approval. In any event, all seemed pleased to have the list formalized, even though the group itself was not formal.

What I recall is that in 1999, some cycling magazine claimed that they had the rights to the domain cycling.org, and rather than fighting them and possibly being sued, the folks who had established the domain bowed out, first arranging for the cycling lists hosted there had new homes at topica.com. Since that time, the WHIRL list was hosted by Topica. (The domain cycling.org is currently for sale.)

On June 20, by chance, I discovered this on the lists.topica.com page:

Thank you! You have been with us since the beginning. Your loyalty has been instrumental to our own success, and we are proud to have played a part in the way you share ideas and information. Certainly, there are many businesses you could have chosen to meet your needs and we appreciate that you have allowed us to our very best for you. Now, our best is getting better!

The Topica Discussion List service will go completely off-line on June 29th, 2014. The final shut-down of the Discussion Lists will coincide with several new product releases. We are confident that our improved technology will allow us to provide you with the most effective & innovative services. We will continue to post updates and dates, but feel free to send any questions to cs.topica.com.

I looked into Yahoogroups, but found that if a list were to be readable by non-members, it also had to have open membership. And on Yahoo, that simply means a list used for spam. One can see a good example of this at https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/WHIRL/info which someone established back in 2006, thinking a Yahoo group would be preferable to the Topica list. It says "Anyone can post messages" and anyone certainly did!!! Consequently, I decided to just run it out of the botsoc.org domain.

--Kathy Bilton, June 2014