On Sun, 2022-10-23 at 16:50 +0100, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: I looked through the links, and glanced at some other things on there. A web forum, hmm? I don't use them. Sure, if you want to lock people into a website it suits the maintainers, but it doesn't suit me. I participated in a lot of mailing lists, less these days, but it was easy. All messages came to me, in my mail, and I could respond by mail. The interface is whichever real email client I prefer. I've *never* *participated* in web forums, I'd have to log into one website after another for each different thing. My only use of web forums is when I do a google search for something, and the results pull up some pages from a web forum that I'll read (often finding them a waste of time), but make no response to. Keeping track of where you are in them is a nightmare. People have tried that kind of thing, here. Suggesting support move to a web forum. We have hyperkitty to thank/curse for that. This list carries on, users maintaining its activity. The various website things come and go. Of course there's virtually nothing preventing existing users from just starting their own independent mailing list, other than becoming splitters and only discovered by new people in round-a-bout ways. You'd also become isolated, but then there's always been the argument that some projects (e.g. Gnome) ignores its users and does whatever it wants despite of them. It seems particularly dopey to me to move the support mechanism for an email program like Evolution away from using email. Every now and then some marketing drone declares that email is dead and everyone is moving over to their web-based platform. Every one of them that I've seen just sucks. My website host uses one of those ticketing support systems, it seems designed to make people give up in disgust when trying to resolve an issue. You can't email them, you can't phone them. As things become obstacles to use they get abandoned. The long-term participants who have answers to people's queries disappear when interaction becomes inconvenient. Leaving behind the blind leading the blind. You only have to look at things like the Ubuntu forums to see an example of that. -- uname -rsvp Linux 5.19.15-201.fc36.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Oct 13 18:58:38 UTC 2022 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list.

On Sun, 2022-10-23 at 10:28 -0700, stan via users wrote: It enables them to stand up and say we've had an 80% reduction in complaints since implementing the new system. Sadly some of them will actually believe that they've made things more efficient, and not even realise what they've actually done. Though others will, and don't give a damn. Have you ever seen the Yes Minister episode with the new hospital that had no patients (and mightn't, for years), yet they had a massive staff, all pointlessly doing things? Nobody working at the hospital saw anything wrong with it. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a Monty Python sketch, trying to win an argument against John Cleese. I certainly felt that way earlier this year trying to deal with the phone company over broken equipment that needed replacing. It took well over 18 months to get it done. They tried every delaying tactic under the sun. Wanted pointless, and excessively moronic, things done repeatedly. e.g. Can you take a photo of your phone not working and send it to me? It's what happens when you let non-technical people work in a technical area. And I'm currently going through the same kind of crap with the local council over them destroying my lawn. They had the nerve to ask for photographic evidence that I had one before they did what they did. -- NB: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the list. The following system info data is generated fresh for each post: uname -rsvp Linux 5.19.15-201.fc36.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Oct 13 18:58:38 UTC 2022 x86_64

Hello all, I can see on the gimp and mc (midnight commander) mailing lists, very interesting information about viable alternatives and that the resistance is raising. Regards, -- wwp https://useplaintext.email/

On Mon, 2022-10-24 at 03:40 +1030, Tim via users wrote: My bugbear with conglomerated email lists and web forums is that while they aim to serve both worlds, they each have different usage patterns, which only partially overlap. But in either case, people don't write comprehensible replies. *Yes*, you do *need* to quote bits in replies on web forums. Five people might reply to someone, we need some context of who you're replying to, and what you're replying to. We can't just "look up one" because the message above yours may not be the one that you're replying to. *AND* its contents are usually not visible at the same time as reading yours (many email gateway forums only show the contents of one message at a time). -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.76.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Aug 10 16:21:17 UTC 2022 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list.

On Mon, 2022-10-24 at 11:32 -0300, George N. White III wrote: I noticed comments about spam handling on the mailing lists Patrick linked (the notion that the web forum was better at rejecting it). I have to wonder why. Surely it can't just be captchas? I'd hate having to do those damn things for every post that I did. Mailing lists have been getting better at rejecting spam, over the years. The sign-up processes being a bit better implemented than they used to be. And some moderate all new user's posts, but that could be quite a chore, and doesn't help against determined spammers who post normal interactions for a while, then spam afterwards. (Likewise for malcontents who post abusive mail, rather than marketing claptrap.) But if I had to post to this mailing list through a website, I'd leave immediately. I don't have the time to deal with that inconvenience, nor the slightest interest in doing so. That was an old complaint about Linux mailing lists and newsgroups (put on your asbestos fireproof pants before daring to post anything, lest you get flamed alive for saying something dumb). One of the pains of Windows was (and probably still is), that you couldn't copy and paste text from many of the dialogue boxes (or not copy something from the part of one that you wanted to). It's been many years since I worked in schools, but I remember similar comments back then. When I got into computing, we had to write our own programs, and we had no OS. Many years later when working at my local school, one of their computing lessons comprised to learning to copy and paste pictures into a word processor file. That was in a high school in the late 1980s. The kids would have been doing more complex computing at home. If you commented on the absurdity of that, a common reply would have been not wanting to scare students away by doing anything more complex. But basic copy and pasting is art class stuff, and primary school age. Computing classes should be about computing (accepting data, doing something with it, hopefully with some decision making rules). If you don't actually get kids involved in programming, to some degree, who's going to be the next generation to create software? Only the self- taught ones at home, who have some appalling programming practices. A few years later I gave a short talk to some teachers on creating webpages. My approach was to teach something about the construct, the purpose, the how and why. Some feedback was that it was too technical. Obviously they just wanted to type something and see it on the screen. No understanding of what they were doing, at all. These days, the same people use wordpress, and the like, filling in templates. I feel that's like getting someone else to do your homework. In the last few years I've got re-involved with some media education teachers, and when wikispaces closed down I suggested they set up a real website. Which they kinda supported, but really didn't have much of an idea (and still don't) about what they wanted to get out of a website and have it do. One meeting was like a staff conference in the Absolutely Fabulous tv show. "It should have pop up menus, and animated video clips... All flashy, and trendy looking." And a bunch of other handwaving. But not a single idea about what information it should contain. You'd end up with some corporate website looking thing, which ticks a box as "having a website," using some stock photos of people apparently doing some work. But, ultimately, is a completely useless website. Ignoring the silliness of creating a pointless website, these were media education teachers, who ought to understand the concept of having a message, and using a medium to disseminate it. An actual purpose. I made them a mock-up of a website which did impart some of the purpose of their organisation. A sample of what you could do, what you ought to do, etc. I got a whinge about it being "retro," but still got zero input from them about *what* they'd actually want on a website, never mind what it looked like. And that's when I sunk the boot in, telling them, "This is like being back at school when I was a student, and some teachers would demand you did some project, complain that you didn't do what they wanted you to do, but had never really told you what they wanted from you in the first place." I enjoyed that. I wished I'd had the nerve to say that when I was in school. Several years of my life were wasted by having to do stupid pointless things at school. I'd love to have said, "I'm not a bloody mind-reader," to some of my teachers. Specialist subjects (e.g. computing) need specialist teachers, and the course needs to have real purpose. Not faking that you've done something. -- NB: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the list. The following system info data is generated fresh for each post: uname -rsvp Linux 5.19.15-201.fc36.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Oct 13 18:58:38 UTC 2022 x86_64

On Sun, 2022-10-23 at 16:50 +0100, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: Oh, and additionally... This reminds me of using Facebook. I'll get an email saying "someone sent you a message," and that's it. They don't email me the message, nor give me any clue about it (and, obviously, I can't simply email a reply back). I have to log into Facebook to read it. Nothing about that is done for my convenience. It's all about dragging you into their ecosystem and exploiting you. -- uname -rsvp Linux 5.19.15-201.fc36.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Oct 13 18:58:38 UTC 2022 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list.

On 10/23/22 08:50, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: I've found this list to be phenomenally useful. The combined professional experiences and individual life experiences are a HUGE resource. No matter what it is there is always somebody who has the answer. Discarding that makes about as much sense as the US discarding their democracy. So, as goes this list, so go I. The last forum I tried to use didn't tie any responses to the original question. You had to google, etc. to try to locate responses, if any. Such a waste of my time. I uninstalled their product. Mike Wright ps. There is a silly anecdote about finding something you want. A sonfish went to his dad, a sunfish, and lamented, "Dad, I don't think I'll ever find a special fish friend. I'm so lonely." Dad advises him, "Be patient, son. There are a lot of people on the land." Same goes for distros. :m

On 23Oct2022 16:50, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: With respect to this item in that post: No or broken threading on emails. This one is so annoying. Doesn't any of the people who use Discourse use threading anywhere. Context is everything. This is fixed in current Discourse, and the the Python discussions are running the fixed version. The Discourse devs were _very_ welcoming and responsive once the problem was well described and the required semantic fixes specified. Maybe the RedHat instance would benefit from updating the version. As a long time antiwebforum email first person, I'm pretty happy with Discourse. I do use mailing list mode for most Discourse forums and work almost entirely through the email interface. Happily. Discourse brings some advantages: - email to email users and forum for forum users (many of the young things these days) - an app (whose primary benefit to me is reply notifications) - the web interface also does notifications - uses and renders Markdown for the text - this IMO is a BIG step up from normal email (I've little use for HTML email and plain text email _is_ a little less expressive than Markdown, which is as easy to type as plain text anyway) These days I'm a big +1 for Discourse. From being a big -1. It does have some issues, and I hope to discuss some of them with the devs. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs(a)cskk.id.au&gt;

On 23Oct2022 17:03, Tom Horsley <horsley1953(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: &^$*$^*$&^$ systemd. What a heap of (^&(*^&(&^ I've been rebuilding a server recently with a fresh Ubuntu, and systemd has been a massive PITA. Gah! The idea's ok (parallel boot with dependencies and associated service up/down though a single daemon). We've all written them. But when it's going sour, it is remarkably unhelpful. To the point of wanting to throw the keyboard across the room. Grumble, Cameron Simpson <cs(a)cskk.id.au&gt;

On 24Oct2022 22:36, Barry Scott <barry(a)barrys-emacs.org&gt; wrote: Thanks, I may. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs(a)cskk.id.au&gt;

On Sun, Oct 23, 2022 at 4:55 PM Cameron Simpson <cs(a)cskk.id.au&gt; wrote: +1 to this. I've never had an issue, but... I'm not that huge of a fan, haha. And yes, definitely raise those with them! -srw

Python dev moved to discourse and that move has also seen push back from folks that prefer email to a website. My personal experience is that https://discuss.python.org works well and I'm not missing the python email lists (that are still going). I like that I can use markup to put code into messages that is not so well supported in email. I also like that I can follow more categories without having to do the email subscribe dance. The majority of user questions are on the website not email. It seems that people are voting with their clicks. I only have to login to one site and all the python categories, users, ideas, dev and more are all there. I have also logged in to the fedora version https://discussion.fedoraproject.org. At the moment the topics in email are the more interesting. Barry

On Mon, 2022-10-24 at 20:44 -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote: I miss using usenet, it was much better than mailing lists. You could post without exposing your email address. The usenet clients had excellent threading, filtering, and a decent editor for posting and replying. Of course spammers were a problem, but a decent usenet host could have taken care of that. And for small projects, you had a free forum service. One (or more) of the news servers hosted it, you didn't. All you had to do was convince a big service to create a news group for you, if one didn't already exist, and it'd propagate through to others. Of course, you could also run your news server, if you really wanted to. -- NB: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the list. The following system info data is generated fresh for each post: uname -rsvp Linux 5.19.15-201.fc36.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Oct 13 18:58:38 UTC 2022 x86_64

On Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 08:44:20PM -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote: I think it's also about control: Web based content can easily be deleted by moderators - whereas emails sent via a mailing list to their subscribers can stay in users' inboxes forever. Remember all these past years when we were asked every now and then to "behave", to respect some "code of conduct"? If we're not nice in the future, our messages can just be deleted from the web interface. Wolfgang

On Tue, Oct 25, 2022 at 01:53:38PM +0100, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: Does that mean that despite "Discourse" the current mailinglist system, that is, sending mail to the list and receiving them back *together* with possible answers in some thread - will be kept working? Except the messages of those who interact via only the Web interface ("Discourse") won't be ending in my email inbox anymore? Is that correct? Thanks in anticipation Wolfgang

On Tue, 2022-10-25 at 17:24 +0100, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: To be clear, I mean the post I pointed to in the head item of this thread, i.e. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2022-October/msg00276.html poc

Patrick O'Callaghan writes: I don't know anybody who regularly retro-mods their archives for reasons of taste, but on the Mailman lists "how do I get this hazmat out of my archive" is a FAQ. It's a little inconvenient, but could easily be applied to retro-modding. Why? GDPR, for the obvious hors d'oeuvre. Then there's the occasional spam that makes it through. And unwary admins who strip and store attachments frequently later discover they contain malware or caches of stolen credentials, etc. If you allow download of mbox archives, stolen credentials can be hidden in message header fields that the web interface and user MUAs don't display. Steve

Wolfgang Pfeiffer writes: Oooh! I think you're onto something. Yup. The hall monitors may not even be consciously aware, and are instinctively rejecting the free and open nature of mailing lists, and naturally gravitating towards, and displaying their preference for a controlled platform. It is true that one can get kicked off a mailing list, but that won't retroactively delete wrongspeech off independent third party mailing list archives. There are no third party archives of web forums.

On Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 9:44 PM Sam Varshavchik <mrsam(a)courier-mta.com&gt; wrote: Large organizations on the scale of ESA, NASA, RedHat, ... are targets for phishing, DOS attacks, etc., and also have services that are only available to registered users. With mailing lists, user management is handled by the user's mail server while forums require users to have a login on the forum's host. For NASA Earth Observations, each user has to create an account and choose the services they want to use. Different services may have specific terms the user agrees to honor. Forums can easily delete posts that violate those terms without worrying that a users will complain of censorship or launch a lawsuit. I assume nation states make use of tracking data from forums operated by agencies such as NASA. Businesses certainly use data gleaned from forum activities. -- George N. White III

Yes, I certainly see what you mean. It's a shame too. Usenet has been around for a very long time. I despise these Facebook type things. So much foolishness. On Wed, Oct 26, 2022, 1:46 PM Wolfgang Pfeiffer <roto(a)gmx.net&gt; wrote: