* QuickTopic and Quick Doc Review
There are times when an e-mail discussion list needs to branch off and a topic that is swamping the list be moved so that those participants who can’t find their delete key and feel personally affronted by other people having opinions are no longer gruntled.
A good way to “take it off-list” is to move to a Web-based service called QuickTopic from Internicity. QT is a free message board, and to get a discussion started you simply need to provide the administrator’s name and e-mail address (QT never shares this data with other companies), a password and the topic title. You then invite participants, who don’t need to register.
Each topic is kept private by obscurity – the URL contains a string of unguessable characters. While participants can give the URL to others, search engines won’t index the discussion unless someone posts the URL on a Web page (which QT also tells you how to do just in case).
The administrator can manage anyone’s postings and delete the entire topic if necessary – administrators choose when a discussion should be deleted as QT has no retention policy and generally removes nothing.
There are no restrictions on who can use QT and what the topics can be about (see “Example uses“) other than the obvious requirement that topics are not unlawful. Messages can use a certain subset of HTML for formatting (see “Using HTML tags in your message“), and there is a special tag to allow other messages to be cross-referenced. Participants can also have new topic entries e-mailed to them automatically.
QT also provides another service: Quick Doc Review, which is password-protected, very reasonably priced ($79 per annum), and provides “instant private space for gathering comments.” It supports HTML and Microsoft Word documents, and allows you to comment directly within a document on any paragraph as well as display, sort and print the comments separately.
This is an interesting and very efficient way to not only fix the problem of a mailing list that gets too busy by offloading topics but also an interesting system in itself to manage a discussion or review a document.
