st: Au revoir Statalist. Hello Statalist.

[Marcello Pagano <pagano@hsph.harvard.edu>]

Dear Listers,

I could start this message by saying, all good things must end, but that 
would be misleading. What is coming to an end is the present incarnation 
of Statalist. That is, just in its present form. It is being replaced by 
something even better. It is surprising in retrospect that in this area 
something can last twenty years in a constant form, but Statalist has. 
Now we are going to have available a form driven system to replace the 
old text driven one. One thing I will not miss is the response I sent 
out a zillion times, "Use Plain Text", to the query about why a message 
was not being posted! If only I had a dime for every time..... Now that 
will no longer be necessary!

Details:
Statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
will be shut down at the end of May and its replacement,
http://statalist.org
is now up and running. I will remain the moderator. The only thing you 
have to do is resubscribe at the new locale.

Some may question the new address and think this implies some sort of 
content-control and possible censoring by Stata. Rest assured, the good 
cop (me) and the bad cop (Nick) will retain all the control about the 
content of the list. So in that respect, nothing will change. It has 
just grown too much to keep here. I know it is very important to a lot 
of you, so we wanted to maintain the high quality you have become 
accustomed to. This is a way to do it. An optimal way in my opinion.

Apart from it being a way to improve presentation the reason for the 
move is that hsphsun2.harvard.edu (an old Sun workstation) is now 20 
years old and the only reason it is still alive is the nurturing of my 
colleague, Bill Mahoney, who is retiring in the next few months. Bill 
has been in the background keeping Statalist functioning all the while, 
since its inception. We owe Bill a great thank you vote.

The replacement home for Statalist is up and running. Visit it and set 
up an account (still for free, of course) and learn to use it:

http://www.statalist.org

When I told Bill Gould about the the retirement of Bill Mahoney, he and 
I put together a committee to find an alternative. That committee was
Bill Gould
Kit Baum
Maarten Buis
Nick Cox
Phil Schumm
and me.

Only Bill Gould and I were the slightest bit queasy about the change to 
a forum, and none of us were against it, but in retrospect the worry was 
silly of us especially since Alan Riley and his team, Kevin Crow, Pete 
Huckelba, and Annette Fett, were in charge of setting things up--they 
created a beaut.

In general, forums do have advantages over mailing lists. For one, you 
can include Stata graphs and ado-files and datasets in your postings, 
and you can use LaTeX math.

Statalist has been run out of my office at Harvard and StataCorp has 
always been very supportive. Indeed, there have been a couple of 
instances where they have helped with software issues. The new Statalist 
server is being run by StataCorp directly, which will reduce the amount 
of work I have to do. Policy and decisions concerning what's appropriate 
and what's inappropriate are still set by me--StataCorp has never 
interfered--but I too shall retire soon, so put your volunteering caps on.

I hope all of you will try the Statalist Forum. I'm going to run both 
the old and new Statalists in parallel for a while. Discussion here at 
hsph will shutdown at the end of May. I expect most discussion will have 
moved to the new forum long before that. (I have a suspicion that when 
Nick moves over....)

I expect that for the first couple of weeks there will be lots of test 
postings on the new forum as we get used to the new software. The forum 
has a Sandbox for just that purpose. The sandbox is called a subforum. 
There are three other subforums. The one entitled Using the Forum is for 
questions on how to use the forum itself. The two substantive subforums 
are entitled General and Mata. Mata is for questions and discussion on 
Mata and General is for all the rest of Stata.

So go try it out and learn to love it. Statalist has a long history of 
helpful, constructive, and polite discussion. I expect to see that 
continue in the Statalist family in its new habitat.

m.p.


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