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Re^2: Good Forums?
by pileofrogs (Priest) on Aug 20, 2008 at 19:37 UTC
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Okay fella, you asked for it... but I'm putting it in a <readmore> because you're just screwing with me and no one actually cares why I hate mailing lists.
--Pileofrogs
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You know, some of these issues can be solved by creating a gmail account that you use just for mailing lists. Lots of space, good threading, search is fast, easy to separate by list, and no danger to your regular mailbox.
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Howdy!
Having been a long time user of mutt, I find that gmail's "threading" is seriously lacking.
Unless I've missed something (and I may have), it simply groups messages based on the
subject line. Change the subject and gmail thinks that it's a different "conversation".
Further, gmail obscures the tree structure in the thread. You can't readily tell which
message was replied to, making it hard to keep track of a heavily branched thread.
On the other hand, I agree with the remainder of the positives. The lack of true threading
is a sore subject with me.
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++
I've been signed up to the Catalyst mailing list for years, and hardly ever read it. Gmail filters just fine, and if I ever need to search on something specific, it's dead easy. If I ever need to get rid of a mailing list, I unsubscribe and delete the label. Easy.
I find mailing lists usually tend to be better quality than web forums. That said, I recently asked some questions on Squid and Apache's mod_cache on the appropriate mailing lists, but they seemed to be a bit too "big picture" and were more or less ignored. It's those sorts of questions that tend to generate the most discussion on PerlMonks.
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I was most certainly not screwing with you. I admit though that the tone of my message was joyful.
But I sympathize with you; I recently subscribed to the bioperl mailing list and it's just as you said. Conversations and topics are hard to follow, and there's no quick way to reply to someone (at least not for me). At first I thought that it was me that wasn't able to set up my filters properly, but reading your post made me realize that it actually IS less convenient than a regular forum for other people as well.
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You can read and possibly even search mailing list archives OK, but if you want to ask a question or answer a question, you have to sign up for the list. Then you get all these emails from the list which are a pain. OK, you set up a filter and put them all in a nice little sub-folder, which you forget about until your mailbox is full. And it's a pain to search that sub-folder. And it's not easy to browse through the emails to find the ones you're interested in, like it's easy to browse around on a forum. And the data is organised chronologically rather than by topic (if you have a mail client that can sort by threads, it's a little better). ...
I use GMail, and it intelligently links related messages together, just like a forum post. So instead of hunting around for the replies to a message, they're all linked together.
All E-Mail programs should be like that -- E-Mail messages are related to each other, so why not link them visually? I see my wife's Inbox on Outlook with 500 messages and I'm not surprised it takes her an hour to go through all the messages.
I'm on the mod_perl and REST mailing lists -- haven't read a thing on either list in six months, but when I get back into those topics, I'll have months of reading to peruse, in my own mailbox (I'm still at 21% on GMail -- have been for about a year -- mail comes in, but they keep giving me more disk space), and not on some cranky mailing list server either.
Alex / talexb / Toronto
"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds
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I care. It's always nice to read about amusing new ways in which people can be wrong :-)
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Wow!
There's a unique and savoury pleasure in being absolutely and totally wrong about something. Apparently, the only (well, not only) part of my message that people were interested in was why I hate mailing lists... Dang...
Ironically, I'm a gmail user who recently migrated from mutt. So, my own mailing-list phobia isn't cured by those. I'm happy they help other, less phobic people though.
In an abstract world, though, forums are superior in every way to mailing lists. Mailing lists started before web forums were around. If they had started at the same time, head to head, there would be no mailing lists.
OR... Maybe the things that irritate me about mailing lists filter out the less dedicated users and produce a higher concentration of quality? EG it takes fewer steps to jump onto a forum and say "Hey, can you do my homework for me?" than on a mailing list.
It sounds like I'm going to have to knuckle down and get into them mailing lists.
Thanks everyone!
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As a mutt user as well, it sounds like your problem is not so much with mailing lists as with lousy email clients.
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Sounds like you have a bad client. And you've got serious problems if emails are making you run out of disk space in this age.
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