On 7/18/2011 11:25 AM, 夜神 岩男 wrote:
>
>> 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?
>
> 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.
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?
>>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>
> 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.
You make it sound accidental. That's not the way I remember it.
> 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.
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.
> From an anti-spam/security perspective a post/fetch system is simply
> more suitable for noise-free discourse than email.
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.
> 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.
Ummm, no. There was always a lot more crap posted to usenet than there
is here. Maybe you've forgotten that.
>> 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.
>
> 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.
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.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com