There are a number of "problems" with the technology that the MMD uses
that I'm actively working on.  Earlier this spring, I migrated the MMD's
Web and Email hosting to a new server with more modern software.  I've
used this as an opportunity to work on several improvement which I'll
describe here.   Some of them will be invisible to the MMD readership,
but some will be visible improvements.  Doing this involves, in some
cases, visible changes too.  Here are the issues I'm actively working on:

1) Delivery failures due to "False Positives" where the ISP treats the
   MMD as SPAM.
2) Improve the MMD's readability on "portable" devices with smaller
   screens such as tablets and cellphones.
3) Repair the broken "self-registration" and "self-management" of MMD
   subscriptions.
4) Re-establish contact with former subscribers.
5) Include thumbnails of images in Digests and on the website as appropriate.

Here are some more detailed thoughts on these items:

1) To protect their customers from SPAM, ISPs are continuously tinkering
   with their SPAM filters.  AI has moved into the picture and the
   content of the MMD _OFTEN_ has For Sale items given how many people
   are ageing out of our hobby.  If an MMD has multiple For Sale items,
   the SPAM filters may block delivery of an MMD.  I think the AI inspection
   has only made things worse.

   I think the solution to this is to send an email with an announcement
   that the Digest is available to be opened, and include a "customized"
   link to the Digest. Clicking the link would open the Digest in
   your browser.  This reduces the size of the MMD in your mailbox and
   makes it harder for the ISP to inspect the content.  Printing
   would still be easy and it makes including thumbnails of images (item
   "5" above) practical.

2) I'm looking at migrating the MMD to a "Content Management System" that
   includes support for "responsive templates."   This is fancy way of
   saying that the web server can adjust the layout based on the size
   of your screen.  The MMD website was designed to accommodate early crude
   browsers (do you remember the Web TV devices?).  It's safe to assume
   people are using modern browsers.

   Adopting a modern Content Management System (CMS) will make it easier
   to have associate editors, such as Monica (Thank You!) help us.

3) The website's self-registration and self-management of email addresses
   is broken.  There are two options here.  One is to fix what's there
   and the other is to import the registration data into the machinery
   of whatever CMS we adopt.  I'll probably start by fixing what's there.

   Once the self-registration and self-management machinery is fixed,
   we're going to encourage subscribers to "Log In" to the MMD Website.
   We'll fix things so you can stay logged in, so this shouldn't become
   a pain. We can offer extra features to logged-in users, like showing
   the "From" addresses in postings, the way we do in the emailed Digests.

4) There are two groups of subscribers I want to re-establish contact with.
   We have many subscribers that have been involuntarily removed from the
   mailing list because our mailing service received a "false positive"
   from their ISP that caused them to become unsubscribed.  We get LOTS
   of requests from MMD readers to be resubscribed so we know this is a
   rampant problem.

   The issue, of course, is to reach out in a way that doesn't annoy
   the people that INTENTIONALLY unsubscred.  We won't ask over and
   over again.

   The second group of people I'm going to reach out to are the folks
   that registered on the MMD website but were never sent ANY Digests.
   This is because of a bug in the registration machinery.  If you are
   reading this message on the website and fall into this category,
   be on the lookout for email from us!

Finally, we're going to try to move the delivery of the Digest back
"in house" or at least do a hybrid between the mailing service and
"in house" as we don't get good diagnostics from the mailing service
about what went wrong when a subscriber is marked as "bounced" or "junk".
We also believe that some that are marked as "unsubscribed" never asked
to be unsubscribed.

We really appreciate your participation and support keeping the
MMD relevant.

Jody & Robbie