ANE R.I.P.

The ANE e-mail discussion list ceases operation tomorrow:

All ANE subscribers,

The voting members of the Oriental Institute have decided to withdraw
their support for the OI's continued hosting and management of the
ANE list. Therefore, all list activities will end at noon (CST)
February 16, 2006.

The on-line archive with old ANE posts will remain available for the time being. A date for the removal of the archive will be announced in advance on the ANE home page:

http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/OI_ANE.html

We hope that the ANE community will be able to move their discourse from the ANE to one or several alternative list(s). Please note that for the privacy of the subscribed members to the ANE list, we will not distribute to any individual or organization our current email directory.

John Sanders
Magnus Widell

--
John C. Sanders, Head
Oriental Institute Computer Laboratory
1155 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
773-702-0989
jc-sanders@uchicago.edu
http://oi.uchicago.edu

(Via the Agade list.)

It's a pity that one of the oldest Internet institutions in the field is coming to an end, but it really is time. I finally unsubscribed from the ANE list a couple of weeks ago when I reached the point of deleting almost every message from the list and resenting the time I was wasting doing it. Many posts were good and thoughtful, but too many others were endless reinventions of the wheel and some of the replies to these were so rude, even when they were right, that it pained me to agree with them. My own experience with e-mail lists is that they have to be very firmly moderated or they end up being abused by a vocal minority, which is why I gave up running them (and is one of the reasons that I normally don't enable comments on this blog).

The Oriental Institute made the right decision and I wish them the best in their current and future online and offline projects. I wonder if they might consider starting a group blog and invite some key figures in the various fields of ancient Near Eastern studies to post to it? Just a thought.

UPDATE: That was fast! Stephen Carlson at Hypotyposes notes that Jeffrey Gibson has already set up a moderated ANE-2 list on Yahoo. At the moment the Agade list seems to be providing all the ANE news I need, but I'll keep an eye on the ANE-2 archive and I may join if the moderator keeps the quality high and the quantity low. If you do join, drop me a note and let me know what you think.