Date : Sat, 14 Nov 2009 09:33:10 +0000
From : robert@... (Rob)
Subject: Mailing list
On 14/11/2009, Rick Murray <rick@...> wrote:
> Alex Taylor wrote:
>
>> I've often wondered why this group isn't carried over Usenet rather
>> than email,
>
> With email you at least need to subscribe. That lets out the unwanted
> spam. It also provides some measure against email address harvesting
> [*], though this may be moot if the list archives provide unmunged
> addresses.
argh.. usenet feels to be about 90% SPAM these days ...
>
> The only newsgroup I subscribe to now is the moderated comp.risks. I
> used to take comp.sysadmin.recovery, until I decided it wasn't worth the
> time taken to read it - too out of my sphere of giving a damn. When I
> got Thunderbird all set up, I took comp.sys.acorn.misc for about a day.
> The only group I miss is argonet.zfc, which was a group local to the ISP
> so I'd not be able to access it now... still, how many of the ZFC
> regulars are still there eight and a half years later? It's the people
> that make the group, not the group itself...
I agree... I did the same with uk.telecom a while back; fascinating
stuff, but was too far outside my *needs* to make justify the time -
but that goes for mailing lists too. I used to read (and contribute
to) FreeBSD-questions and the classiccmp lists, but it got to the
point where I just didn't have the time to keep up.
>
>> as many groups I've used in the past seem to be suffering low traffic
>> as people turn to PHP-based web forums instead.
>
> Really? I always found forums to be clumsy second-rate Usenet wannabes,
> like the best solution for keeping it "local".
And they come and go too - you visit one day and suddenly it's gone,
as it relies on a single site owner too much. Even I'm guilty of
doing that.. With email, and usenet, you end up with archives all
over the net, so all that shared knowledge won't get lost.
>
> One of the really annoying thing about forums is that you need to visit
> a dozen sites, log in, look at the messages... how can this be better
> than firing up the news client, having it collect the messages (ALL of
> them) to attribute flags for "not read" and "new"?
This is why I always sub to a forums RSS feed, if available, and ask
about them if not - Opera then checks them automatically every
%config% minutes and the gives me a "Feeds" menu which shows how many
unread posts are available on each site. For sites which provide the
entire posting, or most of it, I may not even have to visit the web
pages!
> Oh, wait, stupid me. Usenet has totally resisted markup in messages.
> Forums, on the other hand, have totally embraced it, along with animated
> avatars and huge GIF signatures and all sorts of visual crap that can
> only appeal to the mindless zombies of the forum realm.
Yup.. most of my web browsing is done with animated gifs turned off,
plugins off, and I always click and block any ads that make it
through.. this relieves me of most of the crap ..
> Sorry, that's
> not me. In fact the ONLY place I accept HTML markup in emails is Amazon
> (the order confirmations print better that way). Otherwise, plain text
> is all I want, and it's all I'll send.
I do mail via gmail's "basic html" view for the most part, which
stragely doesn't seem to have a text-only read setting (I do have it
set for sending) but with images off and the aforementioned
no-plugins, it's a fairly sensible display..
>You can see the same philosophy
> on my website. Lots of words, some pictures, practically NO eye-candy.
> Er, maybe actually NO eye-candy. :-)
Ah, now you lie - some definite eye candy here:
http://www.heyrick.co.uk/willow/index.html
and a few more of her on
http://www.heyrick.co.uk/ricksworld/piccies.html along with some
random pictures of, well, you! What a juxtaposition..
>
> > I wonder how it might impact upon those members who use a real BBC to
> > read the list (I'm thinking JGH here).
>
> I think JGH reads this list "by proxy" (Arcade BBS?), so all it might
> require is for somebody to cobble together something to translate usenet
> postings into something JGH could cope with. I hope he reads via QWK or
> the like, not doing all of this online via dialup! Ouch!
He's definitely offline reading, based on previous posts.
>
> Storage would worry me, and how would the 2MHz CPU be at indexing and
> threading? How about with a weeks worth of postings? In any case, /way/
> to trash a floppy! :-)
Well anybody sensible will have an econet fileserver to hand with at
least half a gig of space on it ..
>> I might be rambling now because I've been drinking quite heavily this
>> evening.
>
> Oh dear...
LOL.
Rob