On Dec 10, 2012, at 11:00 AM, Jim Klo <[email protected]> wrote: > Additionally, you do realize that Google groups basically requires (or > creates) a G+ account nowadays right?
You need a Google account, but it doesn’t have to be tied to G+ or GMail as far as I know. No one has ever complained about the TouchDB (mobile-couchbase) group being hosted on Google. > IMHO the Google Groups wouldn't be any different than the apache list Yes it would be. Google Groups has a number of advantages like * The list archive is actually useable without having to click back and forth through three levels of hierarchy to look at threads and messages. It displays an entire thread of messages at once and strips out redundant quoting. Compare the straight-out-of-1997 style of <http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-user/> with Google’s <https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/mobile-couchbase>. * You can choose to view on the web or by email or both. * You can get a daily summary email that’s IMHO much more useful than a digest * You can subscribe to individual threads by email without getting every message from the list as an email. * Better MIME support (the Apache listserv strips rich text, and screws up formatting any time I send a message with an alternative rich-text body.) Ironically, I started putting inline links into this message before I remembered that they’d only get lost if I posted them here. * I’ll wager that the moderation support for admins is better. I could go on. > Google Groups is also somewhat painful to search - they can be indexed w/ > Markmail too. Painful how? The web page of the group has a search field right at the top. The results are pretty accurate in my experience, and you can choose to view individual messages or just the thread list. Having some external unrelated index is not a good solution. I had no idea that Markmail indexed this mailing list, nor do I know how to find that index. I don’t think it’s mentioned anywhere that new members are likely to see it — it’s certainly not on the CouchDB home page or the list archives page. Sorry for the rant, but I’m a longtime social-software geek and I’ve been frustrated for decades by the glacially slow progress of mailing list technology. This list we’re on isn’t really any better than mid-‘80s Bitnet LISTSERVs except for the rudimentary web archive. —Jens
