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Brad Knowles wrote:
At 10:44 PM -0800 2004/01/29, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
Sorry, I don't buy this argument. If you have two choices: use more CPU time and network, or improve the end-user experience, choosing "less work for the computer" is almost always the wrong answer.
You know damn good and well that this is not a CPU issue. This is
a disk I/O capacity issue (synchronous meta-data updates). Moreover, you also know full well that there are serious performance issues with enabling personalization mode on large mailing lists, such that for some lists, it would simply be impossible to do.
Why is it, then, that Lyris can send personalized messages to lists with hundreds of thousands of members with no problem? I don't personally have any lists that are nearly that big but I can tell you that my Lyris box sends messages to my lists with a few thousand members extremely quickly. Having personalization as a *choice* is the best thing. Then, those who worry about disk I/O or whatever can live with non-personalized delivery (at the expense of the users, of course), and those who want to move forward into the 21st century can do so with personalized delivery.
Mailing list communities want more now. Especially in Communities of Practice. Our most recent request was to tack on a person's professional profile (from another datasource) on the end of each message he or she sends. Feasible? Maybe, maybe not. But people do want this kind of thing. And I get paid to deliver what is needed. The fact is that Lyris does personalization just fine. So why continue to let Mailman lag behind?
Barry and others will be (or are) working on Mailman 3. I think that he/they should take a long hard look at the commercial MLM success story (Lyris) and take a few pages out of that book. They spent millions of dollars on R&D and made decisions base on it. Why not tap into that? Personalized delivery is just one thing. Don't get me started on SQL issues and the need for vastly improved logging for forensic purposes.
- Kevin