Yahoo recently announced that the Groups service that the CGG has relied upon for years to manage our main email discussion list is being scaled back. Archives, photos, databases, polls, etc will be deleted come December. Since we do, in fact, use most of those features, we decided to move over to Groups.io, which not only has a less Orwellian privacy policy, it also seems to generally run better.
Naturally, several people have raised the question “Why stick with email? Wouldn’t Facebook/Reddit/Discord/a forum/other service-du-jour be better?” The reason’s are three-fold: First, email has staying power. It’s unlikely to go away in the foreseeable future. Discord may go the distance, or it may fade into obscurity like ICQ. Google+ ceased to exist, and any given other service probably will, too, in the long-term. But even if Groups.io itself goes away, our inboxes remain, and we can find a new service or set one up ourselves if necessary.
Second, email is passive. If I had to remember to go to a forum or a Facebook group every day or every week, even as a Board member, I’d eventually lose the habit. Others would, too, and before you know it, CGG would be as dead as Fans for Christ. Since the Guild’s messages come directly to me, even if I ignore it for a time, eventually I’ll remember to look in that CGG folder in my email account. That’s probably the primary reason the CGG is still around after all these years—it takes very minimal effort to stay connected to it.
Finally, there are plenty of other groups that cover those other venues. Want to talk with Christian gamers on Facebook? Check out The Tavern. Is Discord your thing? Saving the Game has a vibrant community there. CGG’s primary venue has always been email, and for the time being, that continues.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we’re ignoring other channels. Grant, of the aforementioned Saving the Game, did set up a CGG Discord channel for us (invite available on request. Email admin@christian-gamers-guild.org for a link), and there are two Reddit communities operated by a CGG member: https://www.reddit.com/r/christianitygaming/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkDungeons/
Anyway, as always, membership in the CGG is open to all, and it’s as simple as joining the discussion list. You can do that via email by sending a message to main+subscribe@Christian-Gamers-Guild.groups.io or by going to the group’s web portal at https://christian-gamers-guild.groups.io/
As a consequence of the move, if you subscribed to the CGG at some time in the past but had stopped receiving email for one reason or another, you may have received an unexpected welcome email and a spate of new conversations starters from the new distribution list. Obviously that’s been unwelcome to some people because I’ve had about a dozen notifications of people immediately leaving the new list. So allow me to apologize—it’s never our intention to spam anyone, but mechanized processes definitely do have their downside in that regard. Of course, those who are uninterested in the list probably are equally uninterested in coming here for an explanation…