>> 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 won't argue you on this.. I don't know the full feature set of both to be really able to distinguish the difference as mostly I use the email interface for both. My primary concern would be about forking an existing community, which to me is more valuable than some 'spit and polish' on a user interface. Having a place where I can post 1 message and get dozens of responses quickly is awesome. Moving to a new solution would require all the existing membership to be migrated to the new solution. You potentially lose the seasoned 'experts' out there that aren't 100% engaged as they may have less motivation to subscribe to the new solution. > >> 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. > It's not that the search isn't accurate, it's not very tunable to the way I search… i.e. I search on some key words, find a couple of relevant threads, then I want to expand to other threads that happened around that time - in case my key words were off, as I often find there are several related conversations that happen at the same time. Then potentially I identify some specific posters that seem to have a certain expertise and want to refocus the search - its possible to do, if you know some of the many non-well documented features of Google search, however I find just not agreeable to the way I like to search. Granted - I'm probably the 1% that searches that way; I've just never really liked Google's search for doing something like a faceted traversal. > 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. > Agreed… but it's actually better than nothing. And it does share some of the not-so-well-documented syntactic sugar for queries that google has, however I really like their methods of narrowing search. FWIW: here's all three lists http://goo.gl/K8EXh in one searchable interface. If someone wanted to add this somewhere so it's more discoverable… go for it. I don't know where a good place for it should be. > 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. Won't argue there… It's moved slowly I suspect because doing so without forking the community isn't trivial… Which is why I think most punt on moving to modern solutions for mailing lists. If there were a way to just 'migrate' this list to "Google Groups" and retain the membership, archives, etc… I'm betting that would be a highly coveted solution. Alas.. I don't think there's an easy way to do that however.. I've seen a solution where you re-mail every message in your archive to the new group in the same order they were received… With that I'll end my contributions on this subject… too much time on non-CouchDB topics! - Jim
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