Is it worth...

... folding this group into the Tolkien group 'Council of Elrond'? CoE does ok due to the posting of outside JRRT-related links but Inklings is due to be archived (frozen).

I wouldn't have any objection... there's also the "Friends of Jack" group. Not sure if either/both would be happy talking about Williams and Barfield and Cecil... but it's not as if we've been burning up the interwebs with fevered talk of Coghill or Warnie.

>1 Crypto-Willobie: It's a good idea. I follow Council of Elrond, and it's a good place to capture Tolkien-adjacent matters.

What would it be called? Inklings is a broader topic than just Tolkien. If this group were called Council of Elrond, I'd assume talk about Dorothy Sayers, C.S. Lewis, etc weren't acceptable.

I joined this group because it's about the Inklings, all of them, and related matters.

I would not join a group the focus of which is strictly on Tolkien and whether elves have wings.

It doesn't make sense to me to subsume the broader within the more specific.

I understand everyone's reservations about 'this group is different than that' on the current group combination discussions. In a perfect world I would not want any (or most) of these combinations. I propose some of them only as a 'rescue' operation to save from archiving groups that don't meet Tim's traffic standards.

So, bye-bye Inklings group. It's got a temporary reprieve now because of our latest posts, but before that it was 2 years and more since the last one. And when I say 'bye-bye' I know we will still be able to read the old posts but no one will ever be able to build upon the Inkling-group work already done.

I've made my pitch. Whatever happens will happen. I'm not going to continue to repeat the same arguments. I'll just mourn that LT will have diminished a bit...

>6 Crypto-Willobie: My main issue is, as >5 lilithcat: put it, that the broader shouldn't be subsumed into the specific. I don't object to the reverse.

Is there any reason that Inklings should not subsume Friends of Jack (+ Council of Elrond)? Friends of Jack (which I had no idea existed until this thread), appears is slightly closer to what I thought Inklings was going to be, and already has conversations about Lewis/Tolkien's influences on each other's writings. Looking at the Council of Elrond group, I wouldn't object to those threads being included in Inklings either, provided I could still mute individual threads... it doesn't look like there's enough new thread volume activity to bug me.

Ideally, the powers that be might consider allowing groups to have multiple names like the new series can.

If the new group/talk features included allowing the admins to create topic categories (by relevant Inklings author?) that you could sign up for umbrella alerts/mutes, I think the problem would be solved.

OK, I take your point (and lilithcat's) about specific and general. I wuz talkin sloppy when I suggested Elrond should absorb Inklings. I had in mind a SuperGroup that included Elrond, Inklings and FoJack in one megagroup -- called 'Tolkien, Lewis & other Inklings' or some such.

Can someone please advise what Tim's traffic standards are, or where to find them.