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Notice: On April 23, 2014, Statalist moved from an email list to a forum, based at statalist.org.


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st: Au revoir Statalist. Hello Statalist.


From   Marcello Pagano <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   st: Au revoir Statalist. Hello Statalist.
Date   Mon, 31 Mar 2014 12:00:25 -0400

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:
[email protected]
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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