Mail Archives: opendos/2002/08/20/03:49:04
On 2002-08-19, DJ Delorie wrote:
> A subscribers-only list is the only alternative. My system
> currently doesn't support it, but I suppose I could add it.
Sounds good to me. The only reason not to force enscription
is the easier use of web forums, I would think.
I can only speak for myself, but since online time is still
expensive over here, I don't like nor use web front-ends,
anyway, so it would be a problem for me.
Also, it is my experience, that the quality in web based
online forums is usually very low, as everyone is in a hurry
there and some people tend to ask before even trying to
resolve the problem themselves, unfortunately... Also,
those people just stop by, ask questions, and off they are,
no long time commitment to give feedback if a solution worked,
to help others, to gain experience over time, to search the
backlogs of the list for already discussed issues...
I think it is easy enough to subscribe to a mailing list,
if the subscription details are explained on the web page.
> The tricky bit is handling the case where a non-subscriber posts
> a real message, and we send them the subscribers-only note, and
> then they subscribe. Should we keep track of the message and
> automatically send it if/when they subscribe? Should there be
> a web form where they can click on their message to post it anyway?
If this is possible, it would be nice.
If people cannot post before somehow "logging on" to the email
web form, the problem cannot occur, though. Again, personally,
I won't miss a web form, anyway.
However, I see one other problem. Some subscribers in this forum
(including me) will use a different account address for posting
than they use for reading. If they subscribe with both addresses,
they will usually also receive each post twice. To avoid this,
we would need a second "opendos-post-only@" list (like the
old "offical" Caldera OpenDOS mailing list), to which we could
subscribe for to authorize posting.
Do you think this would be possible with your system?
Since we are here discussing possible improvements: I think,
some people might like to have easier acccess to the mailing
lists archives.
For example, I have all posts right from the beginning, but in
two different systems, individual ASCII text files for anything
up to 2001 (but mixed in a huge directory tree with other non-
DR-DOS related stuff), and weekly digests since 2001.
What I would like to have would be a .ZIP archive (with DOS 8.3
SFNs) containing all messages posted in a year as plain ASCII text
(maybe in a nice directory tree for each month and day like
\1997\04\30\ or \1997\19970430\ with file names corresponding
to the date in ISO 8601 date format like: CCYYMMDD.TXT).
This would allow us to use the favorite text mode DOS editor
to browse through all the old posts, and even better, you can
download the stuff in one go and be offline again later to save
money.
Do you think it would be possible for you to create such archives
for us?
Greetings and thanks for your work,
Matthias
--
<mailto:Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>; <mailto:mpaul AT drdos DOT org>
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org
"Programs are poems for computers."
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