Campaign for Democracy in the UK

Discussion Forums

There are two main places to find discussion forums on the internet: the “newsgroups”, where messages can be read and posted to using specialised newsgroup browsers or via Google (click on “Groups” or go to http://groups.google.co.uk), and Yahoo! Groups (www.yahoogroups.com which is automatically transformed into http://groups.yahoo.com). The newsgroups tend to have a much higher readership, because they are much easier to come across on the web (since Google is recognised by many as the best search engine and there is a button to access the groups). The search facility provided by Google Groups searches through all groups (only showing one instance of a message that is sent more than once, unless there are different replies to it on different collections of groups) and you have a choice of searching by relevance or date. For Yahoo! Groups, there are two different kinds of search, firstly to find a group according to its title and description, and secondly to search the archive of that group (always by date), which you might need to join in order to search or browse. I have created over 60 groups at Yahoo! Groups, and all of them have publicly viewable archives since I don’t want to put people off reading them by making them join in order to do so – but this has the downside that I don’t know how many people are accessing the groups. If you join, you can read messages solely on the web, or via email (either individually or in a daily digest).

I’ve listed below some of the relevant groups I have set up:

The only one of the above groups that has generated much traffic apart from my own messages to date is the revolutionary-anti-war one. I send most of my important messages to all my groups; if you want to read all of them, the best place to go is manchesterism (Manchester International Socialist Movement).

There are many other relevant groups. Go to (www.yahoogroups.com and search for something relevant, e.g. “election”, “elections”, “electoral”, “vote”, “votes”, “voting”).

I send my most important messages to various newsgroups via Google Groups, including the following:

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