On 11-11-02 7:26 AM, William Bagwell wrote:
Many people (including more than a few list owners) have problems with Topics and using them correctly and efficiently. Can proved examples / statistics if anyone wants? Oddly, I personally have never seen a technical list that uses Topics. Have been greeted by crickets the few times I have suggested tuning them on in responce to a political flame fest.
For the record, I have seen them used on a smaller technical list (which was running courses for different mostly tech topics), but the most extensive use of a topic system I've ever seen is actually the Systers "dynamic sublists" system:
http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Dynamic+Sublists
In short, it uses listname+topicname@example.com style email addresses to create sublists (listname+new@example.com to start a new one) and allows people to subscribe/unsubscribe from those individually.
Overall, it means admins don't have to go around manually setting up topics, it means subscribers don't have to try to read regexes to figure out what subject tags they need to get grouped with the right topic, and it seems to run a lot more smoothly in practice than Mailman's default topic system, having used both.
One of the goals with Systers' summer of code work has been to get some of this stuff integrated with Mailman, so if we're talking about fixing the topic system, I highly recommend we take advantage of the lovely code already prepared for us. :) We may even already have copyright releases on file for this.
Terri