[plug] plug mailing list vs Forum

Cameron Patrick cameron at patrick.wattle.id.au
Thu Jun 24 21:56:01 WST 2004


Craig Ringer wrote:

| > I was wondering what everyone thought about us having a forum instead
| > of a mailing list.
| 
| If you mean web-based forums, I most vehemently disagree with the
| suggestion. I personally loathe them, finding them incredibly annoying
| to read and even worse to respond on.

Seconded! :-)  (Actually thirded or fourthed by now I suppose.)

And without me, Craig or James, you'll get a much higher signal to
noise ratio^W^W^W^W^W^W deserted forum like we had before.

| If you in fact mean a gateway system that doesn't interfere with the
| current mailing list, then I can't say I'd have any objections.
| Volunteering?

This was been raised before when I killed the forums.  We kind of
decided that it wasn't really worth the effort providing a gateway or
resurrecting the forums unless we started getting hate mail about the
lack of forums.  For the record, John is the second person to have
complained.  (The first complaint was sent to the committee list.)

For what it's worth, the old forums still exist (for the time being).
You can find the old PLUG site in all its glory at http://old.plug.org.au/

| > [I] just find that with the archive abilities of a forum [I]
| ... or a decent mail client ...

That only works once you've been subscribed for a while.  (I'm not
sure what the threshold for "a while" is; I'm a newcomer to PLUG
compared to e.g., Leon.)  The PLUG archives aren't the best w.r.t.
searchability either.  I dropped subtle hints about investigating
"lurker" for use on the PLUG archives but no-one followed up on it and
I forgot about it 'til now.

I might look into feeding my personal PLUG archives (since mid 2002)
to Lurker and putting it on my server at home to see how easy it is to
set up.

James Devenish wrote:

| > I was wondering what everyone thought about us having a forum instead
| > of a mailing list.
| 
| If by "forum" you mean NNTP newsgroup then yes, I would encourage some
| form of NNTP<->SMTP gateway action.

Hmm.  I admit that I've never really been a fan of Usenet (or more to
the point, haven't really tried it), but some people obviously like
it.  If this is trivial to set up as Matt suggests, go for it!
(You're our listmaster, after all...)

| Perhaps people should subscribe /either/ to the plug at plug list or
| plug-announce at plug list -- announcements would go to both lists so
| you'd subscribe to whichever one you were most comfortable with??

I like that idea.  (<top-secret committee whispering> Maybe we can
talk about it before the meeting on Monday.  For that matter, Mr B,
perhaps it would be a good time to send an announcement/reminder to
the list about the Monday workshop.)

| However, people seem to raise concerns about "volume" (as you have
| done) at least once each year.

(This coming from someone who's only been subscribed for a year and a
half?)

| Somehow, people "get by". Maybe people use the "scorefile" capabilities
| of their e-mail clients, or filter mail on the server (e.g. IMAP).

Indeed.  With a good mail client, handling loads of e-mail becomes
much less of a hassle.  (Amongst other things, the latency of hitting
next- next- next on silly messages is a lot better if you're not doing
it over the web :-P)

Craig Ringer wrote:

| > A good mail client might be a nice start.
| I should probably offer a few suggestions.
[...] 	
| 	Eudora (MacOS, Windows) 
| 		Some users find stability issues - especially with IMAP - and it has
| dodgy MIME support.

Its interpretation of MIME is almost but not quite as bad as
Outlook's.  Its quirks in this derpartment seem to be exacerbated over
IMAP; I don't recall having major MIME problems when we were just
using it for POP3.

| 	Mozilla Thunderbird (MacOS X, Windows, *NIX):
| 		I haven't used it, but it seems to be growing in
| 		popularity.

Remarkably similar to Mozilla Mail, but without requiring a browser.
Has some of the same interface issues, e.g. has an... interesting...
way of interpreting MIME mailing list digests and its "view all
headers" functionality is bluntly unusable.

| 	Pegasus Mail (Windows, others?)
| 		I have no personal experience with this one. It seems
| 		popular with universities. Apparently it's lightweight
| 		and fairly well behaved.

They use this (or at least used to, once upon a time) at Carine SHS.
Looks and acts a bit like Eudora, which IMHO has one of the nicest
interfaces for mail clients that I've seen.

| 	Mutt (*Nix, others?)
| 		A powerful mail client that's popular with serious mail
| 		users. It's terminal based, so if you get lots of
| 		attached graphics etc it can be painful. It also has
| 		issues (in my experience) with large IMAP mailboxes.

I use this one.  It has issues with large mailboxes, period.  IMAP
support is okay; the main problem is that it doesn't do any kind of
caching though so don't bother using its IMAP over anything short of
Ethernet.  On the other hand, it's generally easier to SSH into the
mail server and use mutt to read your mail there.  It has scoring
facilities (which I don't use yet, but have been tempted to for a
while).  I find its colour-coding ability very handy, as is the way it
uses your choice of external editor rather than forcing you to use
whatever is built-in.

Attached graphics work okay -- hit enter on an attached image and
it'll open in an image viewer -- but still isn't as spiffy as an
X-based mail client.

| 	Evolution Mail (Linux mostly)
| 		An outlook-ish mail client for linux. Heavyweight,
| 		can be buggy, and the UI is a bit too outlook-ish for
| 		comfort sometimes.

Indeed.  It "feels" sluggish even on a fast machine, and generally
doesn't impress me.

| 	KMail (Wherever there's KDE, mostly *NIX)
| 		The KDE mail client. I'm not a fan personally, but many
| 		seem to quite like it.

KMail would have to be my second-favourite (after mutt).  Works well
with IMAP, decent interface, handles large folders really well, does
most things anyone would want it to.  No scoring or colour-coding
though AFAICT.

| I'm sure I've missed many people's preferences, but what the hell. This
| is only a quick run-down anyway.

One you didn't mention is Sylpheed.  It's small, light-weight, has
powerful filtering and can be a decent IMAP client.  I used it before
I switched to mutt (which was quite a while ago).

Cheers,

Cameron.




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