Has there ever been any talk of making the SMOFS list, something a bit more public, say something like a bulletin board?

Not that I'm aware of. And I suspect the reaction would be, "No, most of us here are familiar with what we have now and don't want to change it."

I guess that would make it open to lukers, and some spam, but then it would make discussions open to anyone wishing to make comments, etc.

Anyone who wants to join the SMOFS list can do so by sending a request to the list's administrator, sfrose. I don't have the exact e-mail contact immediately at hand right now thanks to the computer problem on the main machine.

I would rather have some sort of bulletin board system versus the e-mail list, as I really don't want to be blasted with hundreds of e-mails at a time, and would rather view the content on the internet.

E-mail filtering is your friend. I don't have 256 messages in my inbox -- I have 256 messages in a folder marked SMOFS that I will read when I have an opportunity to do so.

If you don't like getting so many e-mails, you can subscribe to SMOFS in digest mode and get only one message (sometimes a very large one) per day.

Given the dynamics of how the individuals behave, I don't see the SMOFS list changing format any time soon.