[Rnb] mailman vs roger / the future

[David Goodwin]

On Fri, 2010-07-30 at 09:08 +0000, Roger Frisby wrote:
> As usual I will be at the next meeting. Tuesday the 3rd. of August,
>  2010. That's AUGUST. we are now three quarters of the way through this
>  year.  David if you do not understand the purpose of the "ELGG Thingy"
>  Then I suggest that it is because you have not attended a meeting this
>  year.
> 

Bad me! 

There are however 40 individuals signed up to the mailing list; I'm not
sure it's a good idea for the 3-4 members who manage to make a physical
meeting to take decisions in isolation. It would help if you posted a
summary of the discussion in the meeting to the list (I don't remember
seeing one) - which may prompt inactive members to get involved; this
may also result in alternative/better suggestions to ELGG.


At the moment, I have little interest in the user group, if one of you
do wish to take over running it (or at least being responsible for
mailman, and supposedly arranging meetings(!) - although you appear to
have taken this into your own hands ;) ) I'm more than happy to hand
over control.

There are no costs involved in running the group - aside from the domain
name which I pay for every two years (£20ish); web site hosting is
provided by my company [ http://www.palepurple.co.uk ] on one of our
servers which can remain to be the case unless you decide to move away
from dokuwiki, wordpress or a static HTML site.


> So for the record, we are trying to find an alternative to mailman.
>  Which is absolute rubbish. There are far better forums around, where
>  comments can be posted and responded to, without having to wade
>  through all of this gunge, just to establish who said what. 

Roger - mailman appears rubbish to you because you have digest mode
turned on. Go to https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/rnb login
etc and turn off digest mode. Then every message will come to you as a
separate email - there will be no 'wading through' of stuff - and your
mail client will handle the threading etc of responses (if you allow it
to). Furthermore, for the rest of us, your replies will then show up in
the "right place" with an appropriate subject (not Rnb Digest Vol XX,
Issue N). If someone wishes to view historic messages, then they can
view the archive online, or download it and wade through it manually.

There have been very few occasions where this mailing list has more than
2-3 messages a day, so it's not like you're going to get snowed under in
email.


In mailman's favour :

a) You don't have to remember to visit some random website to see the
conversation ... 
b) It's free (thanks to lug.org.uk) (no hosting costs etc)
c) There is no maintenance from our side for it - aside from deleting
about 3-4 messages a month which get caught in the administrative
holding bucket as they're spam and/or sent by non-list members. If you
move to using a 3rd party forum, who will take responsibility for
backups/maintenance of that forum (patching, updates etc)?


If you still don't like mailman, have you looked at Google groups? - I
believe it provides a web and email based 'frontend' - so you could
follow the conversation however you wish.


David.