[Scottish] Mailing list to web interface

[scottish+Steven.Murdoch at cl.cam.ac.uk]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 07:12:56PM +0000, Kyle Gordon wrote:
> Ok, following more debates on IRC, it would appear that an effective
> method for communicating mailing list data to the scotlug.org.uk
> website is required. Since the mailing list is already replicated
> through gmane, it has been suggested that a NNTP to Web client is
> implemented on the scotlug site, possibly allowing two-way
> communciation to the list from the site. 

I like the idea of having a web interface to the mailing list. I much
prefer the mailing list to the forums since a push model is much more
suitable for discussion, rather than relying on people having to pull
down the website regularly in order to keep up to date. With a good
mail client handling lots of mailing lists easy, but having to poll
lots of website forums is laborious. The website is the right thing to
use for reference, IRC is the right thing to use for chat, but mailing
lists are ideal for wide discussion and announcements (as is Usenet,
but I don't think it is sufficiently better than a mailing list to
merit switching).

However some people prefer web access, particularly new and
prospective members who don't want to spend the time subscribing to
the list. This is fair enough but I don't think regular members should
be inconvenienced. Making a mail to/from gateway seems to give the
best of both worlds.

There are aleady 3 ways of reading the mailing list on the web[1] so
all that is needed is a way of posting to the list. One easy way would
be to use formmail[2] for posting and one of the methods in [1] for
reading. This would be fast to set up but wouldn't make it easy to
reply to messages. On the other hand, regular visitors should probably
subscribe to the list.

Kyles suggestion of having a web to/from news gateway would be better,
but I don't know how easy this would be or if there is already
software to do this. The other option would be to have a direct web
to/from mail gateway, which from the user perspective would be
identical. This may be easier or harder than the news to/from web
interface, or there may be some software to do this already too.

> All those in favour, say aye...

Aye

Steven.

[1] http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user%2dgroups.linux.scottish
    http://www.mail-archive.com/scottish%40mailman.lug.org.uk/
    http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/scottish/ 
[2] http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/scripts.shtml