Good to hear that your customers visit TheBeachcats.com! I agree that these forums are easier to use and follow than the Yahoogroup. Although it's a little ironic that this site was started over 5 years ago as a "helper" for the Beachcats Yahoogroup to collect and store the helpful tips and information that was sent their.
Back then most of the Yahoogroup members posted messages by email because the roots of that group go back to very early days of the Internet long before forums were available, even before the web was generally available (just scientists and universities). The original hobielist was sprouted from a posting on the newsgroup rec.boats in the mid 1990's, the resulting mailing list was hosted by a graphics company where one of the members worked. That mailing list was called hobielist, even though it was called hobielist, the original members (several had NASA emails, rocket scientists!) owned all brands of beachcats. Eventually, about 1998, the list needed a new home and moderator because the member who's company hosted the mailing list software changed jobs.
At that point I became the new moderator and found a new free mailing list host called listbot and changed the name of the list to beachcats to better reflect the nature of the membership. The free list host were still fairly unstable at that time, they kept getting bought out or shut down, so the list moved hosts several times (eGroups..)untill it arrived on Yahoogroups where it is today.
So the move to Yahoogroups in July 2000 was to give a home to the "mailing list" that was originally a post on rec.boats which became the hobielist which later became the Beachcats Yahoogroup.
Needless to say, a lot more people have access to the web now and know how to post to web forums. Email lists have mostly died because of the massive spam people get.
Some stats on the Beachcats Yahoogroup in round numbers
of 1800 members
200 get daily email digests
400 get emails of each post
1,200 get no email or just "special notices"
of the members who are listed as getting individual emails, about 90% have Yahoo or Hotmail emails, so hard to say if they are really seeing the emails, I suspect most are not, judging by the group activity level.
So most of the former "list" is treating the Yahoogroup as a web forum, but it's pretty crappy as a forum, so the activity has died down from 1200 posts per month when most people posted by email, down to 200 mostly from the web.
Just a little history.
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Damon Linkous
Owner, TheBeachcats.com
Hobie 18 Magnum
Memphis, TN
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