On Sun, 2004-03-07 at 10:05, Chad Walstrom wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 04:36:49AM -0600, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> > Mailing lists are such a horrible ugly anachronistic hack, from the
> > days before everyone could easily get at usenet news, much less set up
> > their own independent NNTP servers. Topic filters just seem like
> > further layers of hacks on top of a hack. There is no excuse in this
> > day and age for such hackery!
> 
> Except for the fact that news servers aren't as popular as you seem to
> be proporting.  With the exception of gmane.org, access to news servers
> is rarely unlimited.  In order to use Visi's, the U of MN's, or Sihopes,
> you have to either ask for an account (and pay), or have an existing
> account.

A large interconnected usenet network is also an anachronism from the
stone age when many people weren't directly connected to the internet,
but using UUCP or some other store and forward network for email and
news. Heck, Usenet originated on UUCP, not TCP/IP networks...

These days EVERYONE is on the internet, you can set up your own NNTP
server with your own groups, and it will be accessible to everyone. You
don't have to carry or have anything to do with usenet itself.

Usenet is an anachronism, a spam filled wasteland that deserves to die.
But the technology behind it (NNTP) is underrated and underutilized.
Decades of development has gone into development of servers and clients.
Its there, its mature, why use a hack like mailing lists when something
more appropriate is available?

(okay so I haven't looked at NNTP servers lately. I would hope there's
some reasonably easy to use news server for small private use by now...)

> News servers can be cool, but they're by no means "better than mailing
> lists".

Are too!

> But the reason we don't want to create new mailing list for SIGs is so
> we don't break the group up.  The GMANE idea sounds cool, but I'm not
> sure we need to have a g.u.l.tclug.{SIG} set at all.  We have four lists
> already "list", "announce", "jobs", and "devel".  That leaves
> g.u.l.tclug, g.u.l.tclug.jobs, g.u.l.tclug.devel, g.u.l.tclug.announce
> 
> I think that's quite enough, don't you?

I'm confused as to what the filter thing is supposed to accomplish. It
seems like something better done in a mail client. Convincing people to
use keywords in the subject isn't a bad idea, lots of other mailing
lists do this, but filtering in the list server seems like more trouble
than its worth. Its primarily a social problem/solution.

The real problem is overhead. Creating a new mailing list requires
convincing people to subscribe, which is a slow complex process of
verification. Then you'll most likely want to set up new mail filters to
sort it into its own mailbox... All this makes people very reluctant to
join a new list. Archives are hard to find, use, and search. Few people
join, and the list dies. Look at how much use tclug-devel gets.

Now in a news server, joining a new group consists of clicking a
checkbox in a client. You can much more freely categorize things up into
tclug.newbiehelp, tclug.devel, tclug.debian, tclug.offtopicbullshit, etc
WITHOUT 'splitting up the group'.

Anyway for the short term gmane is a great solution. Will anyone be
horribly offended if I submit tclug to it? I still want to hear from Bob
or his minions at real time since they'll to deal with any initial
problems and getting the archives merged would be neat...


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