One of my earliest experiences of the internet was going on b-greek, the Biblical Greek mailing list, back in the mid 90s. I remember thinking, "Wow, this internet thing is amazing! You can get regular 'emails' plopping into your Pegasus 'inbox' that discuss natty little problems of New Testament Greek!" I remember being so excited that I printed out the daily digest and read it on the train (from university station up to Kings Norton) on the way home.
The list has been going since 1992 and for many of us it has been a great way of discussing interesting problems in NT and related texts. Even when one is not contributing, it is often great to listen in to what others are discussing, even if there is something of a tendency towards theological topics.
Well, now it is on the move. It is morphing from an email list to a forum set-up and you can access the new b-greek here:
B-Greek: The Biblical Greek Forum
Now it is divided up into lots of little "interest groups" and there are other advantages like unicode support and better searchability. I am going to miss the old email list format, but I have already registered for the new forum and I am going to follow via RSS feed and add it to my blogroll so that I don't miss anything important.
Update (11.12am): On second thoughts, the volume of posts on the b-greek forum is going to flood my blogroll so I will take it off the blogroll for now and perhaps create a new one in due course that incorporates the other e-lists too.
Did they say why they were making the move, that is, what advantages a forum gives them versus an email list?
ReplyDeleteKirk Lowery
Yes; they say it has better unicode support, it's easier to administer, it allows different topics to be set up, it grants more visibility on the web and with search engines, and a few other things.
ReplyDeleteI found the official explanation for the move here:
ReplyDeleteAh, yes, thanks for that.
ReplyDelete