COMMENT: The policy limiting announcements about Reunions to those held in South
Carolina would prohibit announcing those held in North Carolina or Georgia. 
Since many South Carolina families have branches of the family tree in those
States, shouldn't those announcements be allowed too?


RESPONSE: Until this trial all reunion announcements were off-topic.  I'm
looking for a middle ground that will allow some Reunion announcements.  But,
there are many thousands, perhaps millions, of Reunions held around the world
every year.  I don't want to risk having the Forum inundated with announcements
about them.  A few is not a problem, but it could quickly get out of hand.  This
week we have 600+ forum subscribers.  That could change to a much larger number
as word of mouth about the service spreads.  If we had 6,000+ or 60,000+
subscribers, then issues like this would become much more serious.  Few people
want possibly hundreds of announcements each week about Reunions filling up
their inbox.  That is possible if the subscriber base continues to increase.

Personally, I would prefer to say any reunion held in Carolina.  The original
Province of Carolina included both North and South Carolina.  We know that some
Coker families moved from Virginia to NC to SC.  But, Carolina also went from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, and it might be hard to justify the distinction. 
Also many Carolina families moved on to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas,
Texas, Tennessee, etc.  So, if I include NC, then they may feel slighted.  

Also, there may be hundreds of reunions around the world each year for any
particular surname.  I don't want to see hundreds of announcements about
different "Smith" reunions from California, New York, Texas, etc.  If someone
wants to see all of those, they can join a Forum dedicated to that particular
surname, or they could subscribe to the Reunions Forum.  Or, they could go to
one of the sites on the net dedicated to Reunions.  I've put links to some of
these on the Forum web site and provided ready access to search tools that they
can use to find them.

Best I could rationalize, it should probably be limited to SC only or open to
anywhere.  Anywhere is too much of a risk, in my opinion, and could expose us to
a flood of announcements.  

This is a test.  If it works smoothly and doesn't make my life miserable
resolving disruptive uses of the forum, then perhaps sometime in the future I'll
consider expanding the reunions exception.  But, for this test period, I'm going
to keep it limited as stated for the reasons explained above.

Steve Coker
Forum Manager


Steven J. Coker wrote:
> 
> For the month of September, 1998, the SCRoots Forum Policy is hereby modified
> as shown below.  This revision will be implemented on a test basis for the
> month of September. ...

==== SCROOTS Mailing List ====