Mailing List

[kooto (sent by Nabble.com)]

Scott Rossi wrote: 
> 
> If you're referring to Mark's comment, I believe he was referring you to
> alternate ways of reading the mail list content.  There's gmane
> < http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ide.revolution.user > which offers a framed
> forum and blog-like views, and a new one recently popped up called Nabble
> < http://www.nabble.com/Revolution---User-f2297.html > ...
> 
> In my own experience, I've yet to see a forum that better solves the
> problems of email lists, such as repeat posts/topics asking the same
> questions, and handling days with large numbers of posts. ...
> 

I am a member of the Nabble project, since both Nabble and Gmane are mentioned here, maybe I can share with you guys some thinkings from our side.

You see, there are 2 class of mailing list users, one is the committers, like most of the people on this thread. The other class is the users. Committers are the core, but users do contribute by finding bugs and providing feedbacks.

Both Gmane and Nabble are started by techies like you guys. Nabble, for example, uses many open source code. When we use those products, we are users. But I believe you all agree, it's extremely cumbersome when you are a user trying to ask the mailing list a question. First of all, there is no good search in most of the lists. This cause users to post the same dumb question even if it was already answered before, irritating the dev people. Secondly, a user must stay subscribed getting all the junk while waiting for a specific answer to return.

In short, email list is ok with committers, but is not friendly to users - the users are mostly web people. Some proposed to use newsreaders - this is ok if you are a committer, but for most of the users, do you think they will install  a software just so that they can read or post to the list?

A web interface for the users does not necessarily mean exclusion of the original mailing list or nntp users. Both Gmane and Nabble allows the synchronization of list and web, this way, different needs are met, and the community remains one with the mailing list as the core.

So, in short, for the users, I would argue that a web interface is better. Gmane is the pioneer in doing this. Nabble wants to do better by being faster, cleaner, and providing a better search so that a user can search first before they post.
--
Sent from the Revolution - User forum at Nabble.com:
http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Why-isn%27t-Rev-more-popular-Mailing-List--t659015.html#a1758307