real mail for mailgeeks, leave forums for the masses!

Please discuss issues concerning the Ducati League here. This is the liaison between league players and the league council.
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conan
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real mail for mailgeeks, leave forums for the masses!

Post by conan »

Hi all.

Was talking in jabber with sussi and he proposed me to say this here.

I think one way to improve communication is by leave the forum thing.

Or maybe by providing both worlds to users.

I rarely check my bzmail since i'm not a webrowser compulsive user. I think the net has various services and some are more appropriate for some task than others.

Having to check a web page for mail is a pain. And when ammounts of mail becomes huge, a forum is the worst invention to handle it.

I'm suscribed to many mailing lists, some of them with huge activity, like gentoo-users and comp.lang.python. I'm talking of hundreds mails a day.

However i don't read all this mail, but i can manage to do an efective processing of what i want to read on those and the other 20 lists i'm suscribed.

And i still can work and live! :P

Web pages are not meant to do the job of a mail client. Sure, you can do many things with a scripting language like php or whatever, but those things are already solved in mail clients and servers.

So why reinvent the wheel?

I think the league should drop the forums and move to a mailing list system. Maybe, like i said before, allow participation by web pages also, but not exclusively.

Surely i can tell i will be a more active user if i can notice the bzworld trend in my inbox.

Communication is an important part of bzworld, like playing.
conan
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Post by CannonBallGuy »

Forums are far superior for large amounts of information than any mailing list, imho.
Mailing lists are totally useless unless the amount of information is very low and no other features are required.
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Post by birdie »

If you would give people the choice between what you suggest and the forum..than yes
If you want a totally change..than no. Give people the right to keep things like it is, cause some like it how it is now :)

birdie
ps: do you have any idea how much mail you would get on a day?????
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[dmp]
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Post by [dmp] »

Conan, I agree with you totally. But people want small graphics instead of a smiley, they want their large animated annoying signature. And god forbid that we ignore their post because they keep posting useless stuff. I mean, 30
years of emailing have given us alot of filtering features, why use it - when
we have a "neat" webpage that forces us to use a general purpose software. and.. you dont get your badge either using email. We want badges!

We dont want to realize that most posts does not contain any interesting information :)

I use mailinglists where I can. Or usenet. I've seen forum software offering both, but I have no plans on making a patch where this is possible for web-league.

My dream that would be at least a pop3/imap server for the bzmail and a nttp/mailing list for group-based messaging. One idea I had for bzflag.be was to offer mailinglist (like bzi@team.bzflag.be), but I doubt it would ever be used. So why bother.
I don't need huge pictures here.
conan
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Post by conan »

CannonBallGuy wrote:Forums are far superior for large amounts of information than any mailing list, imho.
Mailing lists are totally useless unless the amount of information is very low and no other features are required.
I must disagree with that. I have experience on both systems and it's clear for me that something that can only be managed by "clicks" will not surpass the possibilities you have when can access your mail with all available resources that a computer can offer today.

Think about the command line for example.
conan
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Post by conan »

birdie wrote:If you would give people the choice between what you suggest and the forum..than yes
If you want a totally change..than no. Give people the right to keep things like it is, cause some like it how it is now :)

birdie
ps: do you have any idea how much mail you would get on a day?????
From my first mail:

"...
Or maybe by providing both worlds to users.
...
I think the league should drop the forums and move to a mailing list system. Maybe, like i said before, allow participation by web pages also, but not exclusively."

Yes, it's not my intention to change the statu quo of things. But people like me, which i hope are more than one, will participate more if this changes are implemented.

It's not hard to make a mailing list available via web as archives and as way to post. Surely the software is there already.

Regarding your p.s. i receive around 2.000 messages a day, sometimes more. From list like comp.lang.python and gentoo-users y get 1.000 (500 each), this is a low estimation by the way. Then other lists add their part.

Clearly i don't read all this mails, but i process them by subject, reading what i'm interested. Maybe i read 100, 150 and reply 20 each day.
conan
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Post by conan »

[dmp] wrote:Conan, I agree with you totally.

But people want small graphics instead of a smiley, they want their large animated annoying signature.

I use mailinglists where I can. Or usenet. I've seen forum software offering both, but I have no plans on making a patch where this is possible for web-league.

My dream that would be at least a pop3/imap server for the bzmail and a nttp/mailing list for group-based messaging. One idea I had for bzflag.be was to offer mailinglist (like bzi@team.bzflag.be), but I doubt it would ever be used. So why bother.
:)

Yes, that's why i'm not propossing to abandon forums definitely (well, i say that on the subject, but it's just for attract attention). But i'm pretty sure we can have a mailing list and the mails published on the web, and a form to send mails from the web. So the mailing list could behave as a forum.

I want an hybrid, so people like cannonballguy, which are pretty convinced of the superiority of forums for mail management (...) don't crush me.

Sadly, since i've never setup stuff like this, i don't have software names. But i'm sure this is possible. We have examples, like google groups which maps/mirrors/interfaces/whatever comp.lang.python, so you can answer via web or from your home.
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[dmp]
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Post by [dmp] »

It wouldnt be hard to set up. I've created postlist.org some time ago. It does not allowed you to post from the webpage, but it wouldnt be too hard to add. As long as it requires some means of authentication so it isnt used mostly by spambots.

It needs polishing and some scripts needs to be written too. But most of the functionality is there to control a mailinglist.
I don't need huge pictures here.
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