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On 07/18/2011 02:37 PM, Steve Clark wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4E247D6F.3030809@netwolves.com" type="cite">
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On 07/18/2011 01:00 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4E2466B7.5080907@gmail.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On 7/18/2011 11:25 AM, 夜神 岩男 wrote:
</pre>
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<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">So do you typically provide helpful answers to forum questions sooner
after they are posted when you have to forum-hop than you would if they
land in your inbox or later?
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">Obviously some level of activity must be maintained within a community
to ensure decent response times, but newer communities such as Ubuntu
have found forums to be a fairly useful thing. The forum community there
is doing well and questions get answered at a reasonable pace -- with
the added benefit that when someone goes on vacation they have no box
that needs filtering, unsubscribing, setting in a vacation state, etc.
to protect from lists or spam. Outside of the tech world forums have
proven themselves durable and usable for help and feedback purposes --
overwhelmingly so.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">I don't think Ubuntu is a reasonable project example unless you can come
up with a way to match it's resources, which I believe include paid
participants. Who is going to hover over a forum waiting to answer
questions otherwise?
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">So... what is wrong with newsreaders? In my experience the provide all
the benefits of email (speed, uniform interface, etc.) that you listed
as well as all the benefits of a post/fetch paradigm that I get from
forums without any of the hassles of either.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">Interesting that you bring this up in the context of spam. The problem
with net news is that all of the servers stopped handling it because of
the porn and copyright-infringing binaries postings that overwhelm it.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">Newsreaders require a news server. News servers can be run by anyone, it
doesn't require a global cabal to serve news. In the later days of
usenet it was overwhelmed by crap, largely because of the enormous
number of groups created by people who didn't have time to maintain
them, had a blanket anonymous publish policy, and eventually never
showed back up to take care of their lists.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">You make it sound accidental. That's not the way I remember it.
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">What I am describing is the running of a newsgroup server specific to a
project or interest, say news.centos.org (or whatever for whatever).
Initial validation would be required (not unusual for mailing lists) for
initial posting, and after that unmoderated publication would be
permitted by a validated user. This is a simple system. Disabling
attachments and/or setting file/message size limits is trivial and is an
action which occurs in just one place (the server) and doesn't bother
the users.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">So if you have 100 interests, you'd have to establish and maintain 100
logins and passwords - and configure them on every device/application
you use for access. That's not my idea of convenience.
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">From an anti-spam/security perspective a post/fetch system is simply
more suitable for noise-free discourse than email.
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">I just don't see the distinction other than having more possibility of
after-the-fact cleanup before delivery - and then only if someone goes
to the trouble of doing it and you are slow in your fetching.
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">That we have
forgotten that is likely more due to the timing of the web explosion in
the early 90's and the tech/generation gap it produced than anything
else.
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">Ummm, no. There was always a lot more crap posted to usenet than there
is here. Maybe you've forgotten that.
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">A news service with censorship might be OK. Until they censor something
that you wanted to say or see. Forums with rss feeds might be a middle
ground to centralize the reading side but there's still the issue of
standardizing the forum interfaces so you don't have to figure out how
to reply again for every interesting topic.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">You have just described properly run newsgroups -- and why I am
suggesting them as a reasonable course of action which would resolve
spam issues not just within list, but limit everyone's exposure to spam
in their general mail boxes.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">The protocol for the transfer doesn't really matter here. What you
propose isn't particularly different than setting up local email service
with accounts for all users for every list. That is, it would be
equally inconvenient and not solve any of the underlying problems.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<font face="sans-serif">Hmm... I am on a number of ML one of which
is LKML and I find the amount of spam is miniscule in comparison
to the<br>
number of messages.<br>
<br>
Also trying to keep up with all the topics and new threads on
any forum I have been on seems much more difficult than<br>
on any mailing list.<br>
<br>
I have thunderbird setup to read mail threaded and if its a
thread I am not interested a simple CTL-t marks any new messages<br>
as read.</font><br>
</blockquote>
<font face="sans-serif">oops should have been just 't' not ctl-t.</font><br>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Stephen Clark<br>
<b>NetWolves</b><br>
Sr. Software Engineer III<br>
Phone: 813-579-3200<br>
Fax: 813-882-0209<br>
Email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:steve.clark@netwolves.com">steve.clark@netwolves.com</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.netwolves.com">http://www.netwolves.com</a><br>
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