The future of this list. (Was: Will StrongTalk...)

Rosemary Michelle Simpson rms at cs.brown.edu
Sun Jul 7 14:18:54 UTC 2002


I'm placing this at the top because I don't want to force people to scroll
down through the prior discussion but do want to include it as relevant
information.

The basic issue is polling vs. interrupts.  

Speaking only for myself, newsgroups are useless for me because they
require me to proactively poll them and both my life situation and my work
style require me to be interrupt driven.  In the past I would become
involved in other activites and find on return to accessing the newsgroup
that I had no idea what was going on and discussions that I was totally
unaware of would be referenced, requiring an annoying search to recover
them. Ultimately, I dropped all newsgroups.  

Lists are invaluable to me because I at least see the subject lines and
authors as they occur, permitting me a choice of seeing the message now or
not.  I port all my list messages to a Filemaker database, one message per
record, which allows me to acccess them in a much much more effective and
flexible manner than just a subject-line "thread".

Web-based access methods, such as database-backed sites and wikis are
valuable archival resources but do not replace the great value I obtain
from the triggering, come-to-me nature of lists.  

Rosemary

> > > Maybe we could ask the squeakers if they would move their mailing
> > > list into a newsgroup where the activity would be easily seen.
> 
> > Please not! We discussed this *many* times in the past, we don't
> > want a newsgroup.
> 
> While I have no strong views on the subject, I would like to signal
> that the population on this mailing list changes, and the external
> context changes as well. When some months ago I posted a question,
> I was politely reminded that I should prefix the subject with some
> symbols permitting to identify this as a question. Another tag for
> announcement, etc. Well, this poor-man threading is hardly a 
> satisfactory way to prevent the waste of time of the readers who do
> not want to read particular sets of messages.
> 
> You *cannot* dismiss the issue just by saying that it has been already
> discussed and rejected. It took place quite a time ago, I don't remember
> even when. Jim Benson is also against nsgrouping this list, giving as
> a catastrophic example the smalltalk newsgroup. Well, yes, I know some
> people including myself who don't read it anymore... On the other hand,
> surprisingly, the Python newsgroup seems to work well, although the
> amount of rubbish on it is frightening...
> 
> > But usenet isn't the solution. 
> > 
> > What about a slashdot-like news page. 
> [etc.]
> 
> > We could put up every little thingy
> > that gets done (e.g. new snapshots that get posted, pointers to good
> > articles on the Mailinglist, new goodies, ...).
> 
> More people contributed to this thread: Tim Rowledge, Frank Sergeant, etc.
> They are against newsgroups as well.
> 
> Why not HyperNews? This is a stable, working system, combining the messaging
> and the persistent "article" pages. There are also other cooperative projects
> but more structured than Wikis, e.g. COW, etc.
> 
> 
> Jerzy Karczmarczuk
> Caen, France
> 
> 




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