The Listserv is Dead! Long Live the Listserv!
(or How to Get the Most of NACBA’s Community Environment)
By Gene Melchionne, Esq.
Law Offices of Eugene S. Melchionne
Waterbury, Connecticut
Welcome Back My
Friends…
Longtime NACBA
members may
remember
the Listserv
catastrophe when
NACBA decided
to switch off our
long-standing
Listserv and move
to a web-based
Forum structure.
Regular emails to each member were supplanted by a
web page with the topics that you needed a browser to
view. The hue and cry could be heard on Mars. Dan Press
set up a Google group to take the place of our beloved
Listserv and a rebellion was in the making. Fortunately,
then NACBA President Billy Brewer appointed a committee
to find a substitute for the “forums” and recreate the now
dead listserv. I headed the committee along with Dan
Press and some of more techie members, Jay Fleischman,
John Colwell, Mark Cornell, and Mitch Goldstein, as well
as administration members, Billy Brewer and Barbara
Andelman and our web guy at the time, Mark Whitehouse.
We settled on a software package that most closely
resembled our old listserv and got it running again in short
order.
That software package has not been updated in years and
it is running on a computer located in a garage somewhere
in California. The software and hardware is so old that
sometimes the only way to get it going again is to have
someone go out to that garage and kick the machine. (We
have all had the implies to go out and kick our computers
from time to time, right?)
It is time to move to NACBA’s new Community environment
as we cannot guarantee how much longer our old hardware
and software will continue to function.
Long Live Rock
24
CONSUMER BANKRUPTCY JOURNAL
Fortunately, depending on how you work, you can make the
new communities function exactly like the old listservs. You
can continue to receive ‘text-only’ emails in your email inbox
just as you do now. You have the freedom to sort them,
ignore them, archive them, or delete them just as you do
now. Or you can be adventuresome and tweak your settings
to make the Communities dance. (Well, not really, but it will
seem like it compared to what you could do before.)
We know that lawyers hate change. Some more than
others, but change requires an adjustment. Here’s a
dirty little secret: Even though you haven’t paid attention
to the listservs or the communities, every current NACBA
member has been receiving the digest version of the “Strictly
Bankruptcy” Community posts for the last 18 months. You
have been receiving the community posts all along and
probably didn’t even know it!
Welcome to the Future
The new communities are set up in the same fashion as is
the old listservs. Before we had BK (bankruptcy-related),
C11 (Chapter 11), POL (political), OT (off topic), and TECH
(do I need to tell you it is technology related?). Currently,
the Communities include counterparts; “Strictly Bankruptcy
Issues” (equal to t