On 2/1/19 3:14 AM, R. Diez wrote:
[...] I will ask you how much you are willing to talk to a person who basically interrupts, says they aren't really interested in the general conversation, so isn't really listening, but if you go out of your way to answer in a special way they will hear you. (Which is one way to describe what you are doing),
I do not understand why you are misrepresenting my actions. This is the second time in this list, but I have noticed this pattern elsewhere.
I am not interrupting anything. That is a silly thing to say in this context. A mailing list is not a conversation that can get interrupted. A mailing list revolves around "topics". That is why people sometimes ask to start a new thread if the subject changes. That is how you skip the things you are not interested in. You cannot follow everything.
Perhaps I'm being a bit over dramatic, but it does, in my mind, describe what you seem to be doing, You come in and say that the list software isn't working the way you would prefer, but for this conversation, everyone else needs to change how they use the list so you can participate, since you don't care enough for the list to receive email from it for a few days to discuss the issue, or for you to the archives to see replies. You basically said, if you don't do it the way *I* asked, I won't see what you said, (implying that you don't care).
Note, In Mail Readers, topics DO matter and they can sort and organize based on them, but then they keep all the messages organized in a way that makes this fairly easy to do. Perhaps you don't realize that the Mailman core DOESN'T keep a history of all messages posted, it passes the message off to an archive that handle that job.
Most mailing lists labelled as "users" explicitly state that users are welcome to ask questions. I have participated in many such mailing lists, mostly for a short time, because I am using a lot of open-source software. I have not (really) subscribed to any of them. But I am listening, at least to my subjects. I am participating in this matter.
It is unrealistic to expect general users to subscribe to every mailing list and read many messages before they ask the one important question for them today. It is unrealistic to hope that this will help grow a community.
The expectation for a mailing list, is that someone with a question will come and hopefully first browse through the archives (perhaps with a search) to see if the question has already been answered, then if not, subscribe to post the question, and read the list for replies, and when the question is answered, they perhaps will unsubscribe. It is expected that before posting someone will look at the list and see how it is expected that a support question will be asked (some lists have a very detailed list of information they want about your configuration if asking about a problem, as that is what is needed to solve it). To just barge in and do it 'their own way' is just being impolite.
I am not asking for people to "go out of their way to answer in a special way". I am saying that Mailman should do it automatically. See below.
As I said before in my messagel it CAN'T. Mail doesn't work that way, and it becomes impractical to try and track that.
If you think users like me, who do not subscribe and read everything, interrupt and do not really contribute with their messages, your best defence is to make this mailing list private. However, if this were my open-source project, I would rather not build such communication barriers. This includes dropping terms like "spam" or "a person who basically interrupts" around them.
Of course there is the concept of 'Topic' in a mailing list. Mailman, the web interface, or whatever, does know how to group topics together. That is an obvious feature, because people tend to work/participate in threads.
As I said above, the Archive, since it keeps all the messages, has the concept of a topic, but NOT a concept of a subscriber (except perhaps for authorization to see parts of the web interface). There is no way for a person to see a selected set of topics. Note also that to keep things manageable, it breaks things up into monthly chunks, to this message won't be tied to other related messages from the previous month.
It is true that Mailman cannot achieve 100 % reliability, because it is based on e-mail. Nobody would expect that, not even in web-only forums (notification e-mails can also get lost). But Mailman should at least try its best. It has the e-mail subject and some extra headers to help. That would be enough in most scenarios, like it is usually enough for the web archives. Filtering short prefixes like "Re:" has never been a great problem. And threads participated by humans do not last forever. My guess is, it would mostly work.
Try to implement it! One thing to note, Mailman 2 does not have a relational database in its back end (as I understand it), but the user database is kept in a 'flat file' listing. Tracking the data that would be needed to see if a message is part of a topic that a given person is interested in starts to get large (especially if you figure many people will be using this feature, after all, if many aren't, then is it worth it). As to filtering the Re, perhaps it isn't hard if you are only dealing with strictly conforming mail programs, but having had to deal with things like this, there are LOTS of system that don't quite follow the rules and it gets complicated. For an archive, the 'cost' of making a mistake is somewhat small, the messages gets separated but are still there. In a topic subscription system, it is more important, as people don't get messages that they should.
'Mostly work' is often a problem. Computers need precise procedures, and people tend to expect that they do things right.
Maybe some huge mailing list, like the Linux Kernel, would have to disable such a feature because of CPU or disk load. But most mailing lists could cope with that. Incidentally, on huge mailing lists, where no-one can read everything, people are more aware that you should address and/or copy the original poster, or they will not get the message.
It is silly to ask people to setup their own e-mail filters for each subject they are interested in, like others suggested here. Computers are there to help users, and not the other way around.
Other communication platforms, like Google Groups and https://forum.freifunk.net/ , have both an e-mail and a web interface. I rarely use those web interfaces, and they still do a pretty good job at keeping you in the loop for the topics you have participated in.
Note that these are fundamentally different types of systems. Web based systems are a 'Pull' Technology. In general, the system is based on you need to come to them to get information. Email lists are a 'Push' technology, the information is sent to you as it happens. Yes, the pull technologies may add a notification piece to let you know there is information (but those notifications won't thread in your mail reader to recreate the conversations) and the Push technologies have archives that you can go to.
It's a bit like asking why the city bus can't come right when I need it, or the taxi/ride share have a schedule so I can know when it will be there and hop on without needing to make a call. Different platforms work differently and have different strengths (and weaknesses).
Unfortunately, I cannot contribute code to this project. It is not just lack of time (I have my own open-source projects), but I don't know Python yet.
Regards, rdiez
-- Richard Damon