Message-ID: <000301c2481d$e761e840$c03dfea9@atlantis> From: "Matthias Paul" To: References: <01FD6EC775C6D4119CDF0090273F74A4FD6815 AT emwatent02 DOT meters DOT com DOT au> <005701c24779$78481500$c03dfea9 AT atlantis> <200208191336 DOT g7JDauw17018 AT envy DOT delorie DOT com> Subject: Re: Remove me Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 09:41:06 +0200 Organization: Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), Germany MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by delorie.com id g7K7n3M18708 Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com 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 -- ; http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org "Programs are poems for computers." -- Help the victims of the disastrous Danube, Moldau, and Elbe floodings of the century in the Czech Republic, Austria, and Germany: www.ct1.cz; www.orf.at; www.tagesschau.de; www.drk.de for latest news & donations.