I have been out of the country for a few days and have just
sifted through all of my letterboxing e-mail. Some
(rather long winded) comments:

First of all, welcome to the new subscribers :-)

Secondly, hooray for the trend in "cryptic" clues...

On the point of national/local, my personal preference is
for a more national view. I guess what I am trying to say
is that it is cool to develop locally, but I would hope clues
always percolate up to a national forum. My fear is that
letterboxing develops locally and then evolves in isolation
from the national perspective, meaning that there is a cache
of cool letterboxes in a particular area, and we don't know
about them because the national perspective has atrophied. I
realise the legitimate counter to this view, but, well, thats
my opinion :-) I'm the sort of person that could make hunting
letterboxes in North Dakota a vacation, and am also the sort
of person who could hide a box without stating the country it
is in in a straightforward way. I guess that is why I have
that view. Know what I mean, sorta ... ?

As for hosting mailing lists, I am still willing to do that under
the pros and cons stated previously. I can also provide web-based
archives, digest, and a mailing list for each state if people want
that. Like Mitch, I have no vested interest in doing this one way
or the other, except to say that I would not change unless there are
compelling reasons to do so. (It may be that managing 50 lists
via egroups is a pain; I dunno. I do know its easy with majordomo,
which is what I would use).

E-mail to me while I was on vacation may have bounced, and the
letterboxing.org url may have not been working. These problems
have been fixed. If you sent me private e-mail and I ignored
it, it was most likely that it got lost. I will try to respond to
those mails (from Dan :-)) later this week.

As for biographical info being listed on the web under each state,
I'm not so sure I'm keen on this idea. Not that I'm anti-social or
anything, it just doesn't seem to fit. Somehow it takes some of the
mystique out of it. Also, it would never be complete or up to date,
and would be a pain in the @$$ for someone to maintain. Perhaps I
missed the gist of this thread. (In any case, I'm 33, write software
that manages IP networks, and mapsurfing is my hobby).

As for publicity, I think we have zeroed in on the right attitude.
BTW, I received inquiries from the blurb in DVOA's newsletter I
mentioned a couple of weeks ago, so careful targeting of orienteering
folks may stir up interest. (but note that letterboxing and competitive
orienteering are alot more different than people may realise, so such
targeting should be aware of this. If anyone is interested in doing
a publicity piece, ala the smithsonian article, O/NA is the magazine
read by most orienteers in the US, AFAIK, circ around 2000. I can
provide contact info from the masthead if anyone wants it. I have
been told that it will cease publication in July.

Finally, and this is mainly to Dan, I do believe it is feasible to have
forms backend processing on my server, and the output placed on Dan's
server. In other words, we could implement Dan's forms. How do people
want this to work exactly? One thing I would enforce is that only
members of the group could post clues, but beyond that, have little
to add, and quite honestly, would rather actually letterbox than do
this, but if people feel this is a priority, it can be done.

--
Randy "the mapsurfer"

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