Forums vs Mailing Lists

[Derek Broughton]

Tollef Fog Heen wrote:

> * Derek Broughton
> 
> | Why shouldn't he be serious?  I don't personally think it's necessary
> | because I find gmane perfectly adequate, but listservs are a poorer way
> | to handle discussion than Usenet.
> 
> Possibly for you.  For me, there's no difference, I read them both
> with the same client, using the same settings.

In that case, there's still no reason why one shouldn't seriously consider
news servers as an alternative to listservs.

> However, running an NNTP server and using the nntp gateway which is
> part of mailman could work just fine, but it would require a bit of
> resources to set up and manage.  I'm not sure if Canonical would like
> to do that.

More resources than running a mailman list?  If you still wanted it gated to
a list, then there's really no point in changing the behaviour from the
current list gated to gmane.

> | Your last question is the best, but it's simply answered - try reading
> | the
> | ubuntu lists through gmane for a week.  I'd bet almost nobody would go
> | back to email.
> 
> Most news servers have expiry turned on, my email store doesn't, so I
> think I will continue to prefer email. :-)

And I'm sure some always would prefer that, though there may be no point in
expiring messages if the newsgroups were at news.ubuntu.com, as suggested,
because the news server would _be_ the archive.  However, I (and I know
others who'd do the same) would download the discussions via leafnode and I
_would_ want expiry on my own server.  imo, expiry is one of the huge
benefits of using newsgroups - anything older than the expiry date can
always be searched in the archives.
-- 
derek