Looks like I'm complaining again (sigh) about a free, perhaps volunteer
service from which I have no real right to expect anything. Still...
I'd really like to know if it's just me, or are we all in some
significant time warp here. I've had posts on this list delayed more than
24 hours, and a few haven't shown up at all. Today, I've been posting
since 17:32 pm and it's now 20:25 pm; none have shown up yet. I've never
experienced a 3 hour delay on any other list; 5-7 minutes was the longest
delay I've known, and 30 secs to 1 minute has been the norm.
Sure, instant gratification or resolution is desirable in our times, but
there are other consequences that these delays entail. Consider my post
of Jan 17th with subject "Failed message delivery". O.L. Plaine Jr
provided the explanation. For many hours after this, others responded
that they were experiencing these same "Failed message delivery" messages.
Then Chris Spencer essentially repeated Mr. Plaine's explanation. The
result of the approx 3 hour+ delay on the list resulted in 3 redundant
messages out of a total of 5 messages. Aside from my initial post, nobody
knew what anybody else was posting during "the time warp".
Now, anybody who follows this list, and who takes a moment to think about
it, will realize that every single thread suffers the same sort of
redundancy. I have no math genius, but I think that the volume of traffic
on this this could be less than half of what it is if the typical delay
were reduced to some reasonable level. Moreover, the reduced redundancy
would make it a much more valuable resource and reference.
So much for the philosophy. My pragmatic side tells me something's askew
here, and, assuming that the Mandrake people who maintain these lists
care about what they do (I have every reason to believe they do very
much), then I'm compelled to think that the list software (sympa) is very
defective (a 3 hour delay is surely not bandwidth related, right?).
My question, then, is just what you "mail list software" experts out
there think about all this? Is "sympa" broken? Should we petition
Mandrake to change list software? Am I being completely unresonable? Has
Rod Serling moved into my appartment? Clearly this delay business is
driving me nuts, and I really need some sympathy. BTW, "sympa" is French
slang or short for "sympathique", meaning friendly, or nice; it's somewhat
different from the English "sympathetic".
peace,
dave.
