On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 05:44:07AM -0800, Jim Wilcoxson wrote: > Hi - I don't know how others feel, but one of the "community" issues > I'm having is that a mailing list is not a great place to have 5 > discussions going on at once, IMO. If the mailing list does get more
Especially given the low traffic (even with the recent burst) on the AOLserver list, this sounds like a problem best solved with your mail client, not by changing the email list. Mail clients that can do threaded views of discussions and white/black-list certain topics aren't exactly new. > It'd be much easier IMO if "how to get fastcgi on AS" were a topic > on a topic-based bulletin-board. THen people could look at things > that were directly relevant or of interest. Ugh. Setting up and maintaining a web bulletin board system for the sole purpose of replacing the existing and perfectly good AOLserver mailing list would be a huge distraction and waste of time, for no benefit. It would be OVERHEAD, and the AOLserver project does not need more overhead. The mailing list is fine, leave it as it is. > The other advantage of a topic-based board is that when new people > join, they can easily get a sense of history. This is certainly true, but you seem to be ignoring the fact that their are already many years of history in the AOLserver mailing list archives... The only real problem is that all the existing web interfaces to mailing list archives (as with most web bulletin board software) sucks. Heck, I've never even seen one that gives you a link to let you see all emails over time by that same author! There's no good reason for this suckiness however. It should be entirely possible to process the list archives and present a read-only web interface at least as good as the OpenACS Forums package. (In fact, this might be a good addition or companion to the Forums package...) AFAIK all the information you need is there in the list archives, it's just that no one has ever bothered to make proper use of it. So, the best thing would be for some interested community member to build that better web interface to the email archives. If that succeeds, it will be quite useful for both the AOLserver project and LOTS of other people. But if it ever fails or breaks, it won't take down the AOLserver project with it, because the email list will still keep working as it always has. -- Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.piskorski.com/ -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
