On Wednesday July 2 2008 13:54:49 Austin English wrote: > On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 3:02 AM, Hartmut Figge <h.figge@xxxxxx> wrote: > > Is someone speaking of getting rid of the forum? Those who like it may > > stay there. But, the gateway to the mailing list is an evil and should > > be closed. > > There's a decisive lack of experienced users on the forum. Vitaliy, > dimesio, (maybe L Rahyen, but I can't recall off hand if he's using > the mailing list or not) and a few others help out a lot, but the > majority of actual forum users are new users. Well, I'm using mailing list but also I'm using ML <-> Forum gateway (obviously). Without this gateway, I will not be able to answer to forum users at all (recently I'm very busy in real life so I don't write to the list/forum frequently at this moment but this hopefully will improve in near future). Also, I'm using gateway to monitor "illegal" activities on the forum like spam posting, etc. so such garbage can be deleted ASAP. And of course I'm using it to just read messages/discussions from forum users. Let's not forget whole point of this gateway. Its primary purpose - to help users find one place to ask questions, so everybody who want to help can do so in one place too. This simplify many things a lot. In my opinion *only* problem we have with gateway it is the fact that gateway doesn't set In-Reply-To header perfectly but to me this looks like very minor problem - at least in KMail I haven't any trouble understanding replies from forum users (all their replies looks like reply to the first post in a thread but it's easy to understand proper order if sorting by date is enabled). Of course threads doesn't look perfectly with not perfectly set In-Reply-To headers but I think it is too much to say that this minor bug is "breaking mailing list". For example, I have thread support in my e-mail client enabled but don't have trouble understanding replies from forum users because all of them are shown in proper thread (at least this is true for KMail). Yes, for some people this cosmetic problem is important. Yes, I understand why they can't improve gateway: they either aren't programmers or don't have enough time/motivation. But fact is that this bug will not magically disappear by itself - someone should find enough free time and motivation to fix it. Talking like that: "Forums are "breaking" mailing list so let's break the gateway instead!" doesn't help anyone. And breaking gateway is MUCH worse thing. Therefore only proper solution to the problem is to fix the bug.
