Birding News Update

It's been a solid week since the ABA launched Birding News, or you could say "rebooted" Jack Siler's ubiquitous Birdingonthe.net.

To say that the past week has been a busy one would be a bit of an understatement. We asked for your feedback, and over 400 of you responded. We quickly learned the script routine that determined which list each message should be posting to had a serious flaw. One we hadn't picked up on, because none of us working on it live in the states that were effected. What was happening concerned lists with very similar email addresses, like the two Oregon listservs: "obol@..." and "cobol@...", or California and Alabama ("calbirds@..." and "albirds@...").

Today I am very happy (relieved) to report that this major issue is now fixed. Along with that, we've fixed a few other problems, primarily message formatting due to multiple encoding types. We'll be watching that closely to pick up the strays (there are still a few), and deal with them.

In the coming weeks, we will also be offering each list's messages in digest form, or "Siler-style", as well as a mobile option. We're also still working on how best to deal with messages that require pre-formatted type (like hawkwatch reports), and getting more mailing lists added.

We're dedicated to making Birding News just as valuable, dependable and beloved as BirdMail was and with your help and input, growing into something even better. We appreciate your feedback and concerns as we go through this process. You can keep up to speed on that here: http://birding.aba.org/updates.php

And as always, please do not hesitate to contact us with your thoughts, suggestions or concerns: http://birding.aba.org/contact.php