The Idle Pen: Mired in Messages

I'm frustrated by the lack of places and opportunities available to engage in constructive license plate-related discussions online.

The only popular venue for plate discussions (since the collapse of another totally-redundant mailing list on AOL's servers) tends to be the "Plates" group on Yahoo!...which, honestly, doesn't have much going for it. Like all Yahoo! groups, it's a half-arsed cross between a pure e-mail list and a featured website. The ad-ridden message interface is primitive and has been stagnated in a puddle of unimprovement for years. Unless you subscribe on digest mode, you're forced to litter your e-mail inbox with dozens of new messages each day. If you do take advantage of the e-mail digest, you don't find out about anything until a day or two after the fact. It's inconvenient to follow, in any case.

The haphazard nature of the list makes it just short of impossible to have linear, threaded conversations there, and any conversations that do erupt are subdued under the gross onslaught of messages in short order. Since all messages are grouped without benefit of category or subforum, it's difficult to track down posts on the more technical side without having your eyes glaze over eBay rants or boring "buy"/"sell"/"trade" banter in the process. As a further insult, older messages are pruned for space, so you can't dig up data from the wealth of questions asked before or have any reassurance that what you contribute will go down for posterity.

Although I've subscribed to the "Plates" list (as well as the defunct AOL list) off and on again for over half a decade, I've rarely posted there. It may be just as well, since on a good day the course of events when I do so plays out as such:

1. I post a question on the list.
2. Someone provides an answer only vaguely related to the subject at hand.
3. Someone else quotes the body of my message, plus a statement along the lines of "Wow! That's interesting! Let me know when you find out!"
4. I get one or two direct e-mails (bypassing the group entirely) inquiring if I have some specific variety of plate for trade, with no further interest given.

By all logic, the group should have fallen by the wayside in favor of something better in about 2002: Full-featured web-based forums have sprouted up for practically every topic and specialized community imaginable since then. Paradoxically enough, for the license plate hobby the opposite trend has held true: The rudimentary message board on CALPL8S.com disappeared long ago, while those on platetrading.com vanished into the ether along with the rest of the site. Only the Australian content-dominated, IPB-based Plate Shed is left...the "#1 forum" by default since nothing else (to my knowledge) exists.

Unfortunately, one gets the impression that a good constingent of plate collectors online is challenged by technology or otherwise resistant to change. (The nostalgic ramblings for a mimeographed newsletter are priceless, although that's fodder for me to save for another day.) "The problem with forums," someone noted a couple years ago, "is that you have to go and look at them." Good grief! Do these people live their entire lives out of their inboxes? There's much more to be gotten out of online communication than e-mail alone.

I sometimes wonder what it would take for a good portion of North American license plate collectors to embrace a flexible, modern bulletin board format for their interaction online: Someone dropping vBulletin or the equivalent over the front page of ALPCA.org itself? Yahoo! making the effort of upgrading its groups to a threaded forum-style interface, or doing away with them entirely? Sheer chance? Unfortunately, we'll probably be wading through clunkiness, unconstructive banter, routine prunings, and the occasional mailing-list e-mail misfiled as spam for years until that happens...

The Network License Plates The Idle Pen

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©2008 Andrew Turnbull.
Last update March 31, 2008.