Hello!
My name is Devin, and although I'm not a scrapbooker, there is something that I might be able to do to help out this group get to even more people.
As some of you may know, there's a collection of newsgroups, known as the Big-8 because it involves 8 top-level hierarchies (like rec.*), that has a particular process that newsadmins around the world have generally agreed to follow when adding or removing groups from those 8 hierarchies. At one point, rec.crafts.scrapbook was proposed as a new group under this procedure, but lost the resulting vote.
A few news admins went ahead and created the group on their servers. While this is completely within their rights to do so, this created a problem -- since the group hadn't been created according to the procedure that is considered to be customary, many newsadmins consider it to be a "bogus" groups and will not carry it on their servers. This includes some of the larger news service providers.
The reason I bring this up now is that the topic -- and this group -- have come up in discussion in news.groups (the home of the group creation procedure). Many of the admins there have expressed their willingness to support the "official" creation of the group, since it has shown good, healthy levels of traffic since that vote 5 years ago. (This is usually one of the largest concerns for any new proposed group -- that the proponents can show that there is a demand for the group.)
The consensus among news.group seems to be that getting this group formally approved at this time would be pretty much a slam dunk, if only someone stepped forward to do it. Which is where I come in. I'm volunteering to be the official "proponent" to get the ball rolling on the RFD (Request for Discussion) and CFV (Call for Votes) process, handle filling out the electronic paperwork and such, and generally do all the gruntwork associated with pushing an newgroup proposal thorugh the process.
Since I am not a user of this group, however, I wanted to stop and ask you all: is this something you would want to happen? The requirements for the vote are pretty simple: there must be at least twice as many YES votes as NO votes, and there must be at least 100 more YES votes than NO votes. Most group proposals fail not due to NO votes, but due to a lack of YES votes.
My concern at this point is in helping what seems to be a vital, healthy group get acknowledged as "legit" and help it jump through the hoops. If the vote passes, this group will be created on hundreds more news servers across the world and make it easier for scrapbookers to find and use.
At this point, there is no formal vote -- I just would like you to email me and let me know if you would be willing to vote yes if I were to go forward with this. This is a straw poll and is usually considered to be the last step of gathering hard data to support traffic predictions.
So, if this is something that you would like to see happen, drop me a note via email to snipped-for-privacy@thecabal.org and let me know. If you don't care, simply ignore me. :) I'll come back in a couple of days to let you all know the results and whether they indicate some sort of consensus to move forward.
Have a great one!