- On 2003.10.28, in <20485453-0988-11D8-A02B-0003934516A8@plaidworks.com>,
- "Chuq Von Rospach" <chuqui@plaidworks.com> wrote:
because once you leave the niche of dealing with your fellow geeks, that's what users are going to want. browser access. NNTP is simply a
It's the "non-geeks" I'm trying to help: I support 25,000 of them, and I really don't worry much about the "geeks". They know how to do for themselves.
non-issue any more, and iMap is fine, but they know how to go to a URL, don't assume they can reconfigure their mailer.
Where I work -- and I know that it's not like this everywhere, but I have to assume we're not the only place like this -- we configure users' mailers for them initially. (So we can configure in access to our list server(s).) We have a telephone support line that regularly works people through mailer issues. Here, reconfiguring a mailer is not a hard problem, compared to getting usable HTML archives in a supportable server configuration.
Not saying don't do this, but if you write geek tools for geeks, you'll lose the rest of your audience, the non-technical users.
Agreed, but I don't think I'm proposing "geek tools". I'm trying to establish a shared pathway for getting into a message archive that lets geeks use their tools, and non-geeks use theirs, equally.
Nobody needs web access: what they need is access via a web browser. With browsers that understand NNTP and IMAP prevalent, and with a wide selection of web-mail and web-news gateways for the cases where that doesn't work, this is sufficient.
is it? it seems to me to (frankly) be a real hack with bad navigation, at least the stuff I've seen. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
What seems to have bad navigation? I'm not sure what component you mean. I would say that webmail programs generally are awful, but I know that 40% of my users love using them. I think it's also relevant that every web-based list archive I've ever used is atrocious for navigation; their only selling points seem to be ease of referral and indexing. (And yes, I agree that these are important elements.)
But granted, this is an overzealous assessment. I should say: IMAP and NNTP access are sufficient for certain environments of which I believe mine is an example.
And for intermittent or one-time access to an archive? won't bother. And how does it get into google so they know to look at it in the first place?
Again, I'm not talking (for the most part) about public-access lists. I'm talking about private communities consisting mostly of people within a common real-world context. Perhaps I should have made that more clear. This happens a lot: I seriously doubt that most mailing lists, even most Mailman mailing lists, are public.
I'm not really thrilled with this avenue. sorry.
Don't be sorry. I want to google certain lists as much as the next person, and I know that this model doesn't work as well as HTML archives in that respect (though I will note as a sidebar that Google happily indexes NNTP servers). I'm not trying to kill the web archive go before its time, and nothing I've proposed obviates having one. All I've described is a parallel mode of access that I believe is more appropriate and more useful in some settings.
We're already plugging external archivers into Mailman now, and nothing in this suggestion prevents us from continuing to do that. The only potential change, I would say, is that in one design, archivers would pull from NNTP, IMAP, or a message store, rather than actively being fed articles. I don't particularly advocate that, lacking a better understanding of the internals of the list server. I take no issue with leaving in a means of delivering messages to archivers, I just would like to see it become one of several access messsage channels, preferably all with some shared interface to the core processor.
-- -D. dgc@uchicago.edu University of Chicago > NSIT > VDN > ENSS > ENSA > You are here . . . . . . . always line up dots