[Scottish] Making scotlug mailing list available via gmane news gateway?

[David Marsh's list-reading hat]

[Traditional interleaved quoting: please read to end for all comments]

Hi Willie,

On Wed, 5 Mar 2003 14:23:35 +0000
willie fleming <slug@itscotland.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> On Wednesday 05 Mar 2003 12:32, David Marsh's list-reading hat wrote:-
> > I don't know if other people on the list are aware of the extremely
> > useful gmane <http://www.gmane.org/> news<->list gateway?

> Well, what do you all think, then?.
>  Personally I dont have a problem with this, but I havent looked at it
>  in  depth yet. 

> I dont use a news-reader, mostly cos I could never keep up
> with the bandwidth of stuff I was interested in, rather than for any
> technical reason but those of you who do may prefer to get your
> Scotlug stuff via a news reader.

The thing with news (which has come as a shock to me, but then I'm
prehistoric in web [sic] terms ;-)) is that generally only oldtimers and
geeks do news (in the traditional usenet sense). Newbies (admittedly,
we're probably not talking about Linux users here!) have enough trouble
getting to grips with email, that news is just a completely alien planet
to them.. ;-(

By gatewaying this list to gmane, probably what would happen is that
some of us (maybe just me?!!!) would prefer to read/write through a
newsreader than through email. We *might* find that a few more people
appear out of the woodwork and also "join" the "list" that way, but
perhaps not? Arguably, the more local folks find out about Linux and
know that they can ask here for help, the better?

So, I don't think there is a risk of *this* list being swamped with much
extra traffic as a result of being gatewayed to gmane.

(I agree with you, though, that in general usenet can be very 'busy',
but I usually find that's the, err, roundabout to the swing of being
able to filter out posts much more easily in news?)


> Any body got any thoughts on the security aspects of this?

gmane seem fairly on the ball with this.

Lists can be gatewayed to gmane in such a way that email addresses are
obfuscated, thus preventing (reducing?) the potential for spam.

<clicketty-click>

Just checking to see whether there are already archives for the list..
Indeed, there are already archives on the main lug.org.uk site, but
email addresses are already obfuscated (apart from those in sigs,
sadly!!).

(Just noticed that there doesn't seem to be any info about this mailing
list on the new and shiny (nice - to whoever did it) scotlug.org.uk)

gmane also allow various anti-archiving headers to prevent longterm
archiving of posts. Presumably anybody who is already concerned about
such things already knows how to use these..


In order to post to a gmane group, users must reply to a message to
authenticate their email address, so hopefully this provides a good
defence against spam. I certainly haven't seen any spam on gmane
groups/lists that I use. 

Come to that, I haven't seem much spam on usenet for quite some time,
probably good filtering by upstreams (and possibly a switch by the
spamming scum realising that as newbies don't do news, email is where
they 'should' be targetting their, err, resources.. :-(  )

 
> There has been some discussion about moving to hosting our own mailing
> list instead of doing it through the lug.org.uk domain but no firm
> decisions have been taken.

If it works, don't fix it, etc... ;-D

It would be 'nice' to have the list associated with the scotlug domain,
but as long as it works, it doesn't bother me either way either!


>  I manually get rid of some spam from this most days and
>  approve/disapprove 
> msgs from non-subscribed addresses but its <5 mins work per day so its
> no big deal either way.

> 
> As always, your thoughts, suggestions and offers of drink are most
> welcome-- 
> Best Regards
> Willie Fleming
> Mailing List admin

Well, as list admin, I guess it's your call!

Setting up a gmane gateway is dead simple: you basically just have to
tell them what the list address is, what list software is used, and a
suggested group title. (eg: gmane.org.user-groups.scotlug.misc, say?)

(Guess what Sydney LUG call themselves, yes, SLUG ;-)


If you'd like me to do this, please let me know, but I assume you can do
it yourself if you want to (supply of Round Tuits and all that ;-)


Cheers,


David.



-- 
David Marsh, Glasgow, Scotland, N Europe. | http://web.viewport.co.uk/
<email valid @time of writing>, but reply to list preferred, thanks.