Re: Members in alphabetical order

Posted by Wheatland Garden on Oct 20, 2014; 3:06pm
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Members-in-alphabetical-order-tp7592053p7592075.html

Perhaps I should explain further how this forum is being used so that you aren’t imagining a different, and perhaps more common, scenario.  

This is a community garden that consists of a few dozen people.  Each year, a bunch of people leave, and a bunch of people arrive, typically in March-May but sporadically at other times too.  In previous years, we were using a different forum that we can no longer use, so I set up a forum on Nabble because it has various desired features: free or nearly so, option to view and post online, option to receive posts by email, option to receive notification of new topics only (without bombardment by all subsequent comments) by email, ability to access individuals by email.  The general idea is that one person (currently me) can be administrator, modifying the list of members as needed, and that everyone else can simply post to the forum, or email another gardener.   Otherwise it becomes a bureaucratic nightmare to not only keep track of volatile membership, but also to get everybody up to speed.    

The forum is set up so that only explicitly approved Members can use it; randomly registered people cannot.  I added email addresses of current gardeners to the list of Members, in alphabetical order by lastname-firstname because that’s how it was in my spreadsheet.  Then I asked people to transfer over from the old forum.  As people registered, they chose usernames.  So now the list of Members appears haphazard, though it is in the order that I entered the names.  Gardening is done for the year, we’re not yet using the forum, just preparing for next spring, so nobody has posted.  There are only a few dozen people, so the list order is not a huge practical issue, but it is aesthetically displeasing and a source of confusion.  I would prefer alphabetical order.  

Another issue, which I put in another post for a clean separation, is the ability to email all members.  This is a group of actual people who actually know each other to some extent in real life.  There are a few people, let’s call them Organizers, who deal with issues beyond their own personal plots, e.g. maintenance or events.  Most people would rather garden, tend to be rather oblivious to the wider world, prefer not to subscribe, and don’t check online often.  Generally this is fine.  Every so often though, crucial information needs to be conveyed.  Currently, this is done by maintaining a separate list of email addresses and giving it to the few Organizers.  Keeping two lists in sync is obviously awkward and prone to error, and in the modern world one hopes for a more efficient solution.  I too would rather garden, and not have my time eaten up with bureaucracy.  It would be simpler if I could designate a group of Organizers who had the ability to directly email all Members.  I understand that I could add people as Administrators and they’d have access to email addresses in the Members list, but this is a low tech group and I would prefer not to have them bumbling around behind the scenes.