(comments from a lurker on python-list) - Google "groups" is a disaster. It's extremely poorly-run, and is in fact a disservice to Usenet -- which is alive and well, tyvm, and still used by many of the most senior and experienced people on the Internet. (While some newsgroups are languishing and some have almost no traffic, others are thriving. As it should be.) I could catalog the litany of egregious mistakes that Google has made, but what's the point? They're clearly uninterested in fixing them. Their only interest is in slapping the "Google" label on Usenet -- which is far more important in the evolution of the Internet than Google will ever be -- so that they can use it as a marketing vehicle. Worse, Google has completely failed to control outbound abuse from Google groups, which is why many consider it a best practice to simply drop all Usenet traffic originating there.
- That said, there is value in bidirectionally gatewaying mailing lists with corresponding Usenet newsgroups. Usenet's propagation properties often make it the medium of choice for many people, particularly those in areas with slow, expensive, erratic, etc. connectivity. Conversely, delivery of Usenet traffic via email is a better solution for others. Software like Mailman facilitates this fairly well, even given the impedance mismatch between SMTP and NNTP. - Mailing lists/Usenet newsgroups remain, as they've been for a very long time, the solutions of choice for online discussions. Yes, I'm aware of web forums: I've used hundreds of them. They suck. They ALL suck, they just all suck differently. I could spend the next several thousand lines explaining why, but instead I'll just abbreviate: they don't handle threading, they don't let me use my editor of choice, they don't let me build my own archive that I can search MY way including when I'm offline, they are brittle and highly vulnerable to abuse and security breaches, they encourage worst practices in writing style (including top-posting and full-quoting), they translate poorly to other formats, they are difficult to archive, they're even more difficult to migrate (whereas Unix mbox format files from 30 years ago are still perfectly usable today), they aren't standardized, they aren't easily scalable, they're overly complex, they don't support proper quoting, they don't support proper attribution, they can't be easily forwarded, they...oh, it just goes on. My point being that there's a reason that the IETF and the W3C and NANOG and lots of other groups that could use anything they want use mailing lists: they work. - That said, they work *if configured properly*, which unfortunately these days includes a hefty dose of anti-abuse controls. This list (for the most part) isn't particularly targeted, but it is occasionally and in the spirit of trying to help out, I can assist with that. (I think it's fair to say I have a little bit of email expertise.) If any of the list's owners are reading this and want help, please let me know. - They also work well *if used properly*, which means that participants should use proper email/news etiquette: line wrap, sane quoting style, reasonable editing of followups, preservation of threads, all that stuff. The more people do more of that, the smoother things work. On the other hand, if nobody does that, the result is impaired communication and quite often, a chorus of "mailing lists suck" even though the problem is not the mailing lists: it's the bad habits of the users on them. (And of course changing mediums won't fix that.) - To bring this back around to one of the starting points for this discussion: I think the current setup is functioning well, even given the sporadic stresses placed on it. I think it would be best to invest effort in maintaining/improving it as it stands (which is why I volunteered to do so, see above) rather than migrating to something else. ---rsk -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list