[plug] plug mailing list vs Forum

[James Devenish]

In message <40DBC6C3.1080901 at postnewspapers.com.au>
on Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 02:31:31PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> William Kenworthy wrote:
> >I have used news a lot in the past and find that for me it is a big turn
> >off.  [snip]   Again, collects too much rubbish, address harvesting,
> >difficulty in trying to find old posts after they have expired and so
> >on.

We would run our own NNTP server and it would not be part of USENET per
se. However, I presume we would need some sort of access control
(otherwise, there could be robots that scan for public news services to
harvest addresses or send spam). I don't know enough about open source
daemons' access controls to propose how to limit the read/post
privileges to plug at plug subscribers. Since list subscribers aren't
necessarily PLUG members, they don't necessarily have UNIX accounts on
the PLUG servers. Perhaps people could required to provide their
plug at plug subscription e-mail address as a 'username' and their Mailman
password -- but I anticipate this would require hacking. I'd love it if
someone could tell me I'm wrong :-) Perhaps someone who actually runs an
NNTP server could advise us about all this.

The greater flaw with the NNTP idea (although I would like to read plug
with my newsreader sometimes) is that it would not impose forum-like
'categories'. Obviously, forum Categories would be useful for people
looking to use the archives as their first point of inquiry. The only
way to really achieve this would be through groups, yet I cannot imagine
how the Mailman gating mechanisms could cope with that. Also,
categorisation could backfire: people might miss a post about OpenGL
under Mandrake because it's filed under 'Graphics' and the person only
searches under 'Mandrake'. So...NNTP would give people a more efficient
way for casual readers to weed through articles but would not provide
any archival advantages over the "e-mail + Google/lurker" combination.

As someone mentioned, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have both the
e-mail lists *and* fora, it only makes sense to have the *same*
information available via different interfaces (e.g. e-mail, news, web).
I don't really know of any great gateway system that could give us the
best of all worlds. As such, I'm sure we will stick with the mailing
list for the time being, although we could create a low-volume
plug-announce list regardless of all this other fuss.