7 ms·

It's funny, because from his point of view mailing lists are awesome. But from the point of view of everyone else they're pretty terrible - it's extremely rare

It's funny, because from his point of view mailing lists are awesome. But from the point of view of everyone else they're pretty terrible - it's extremely rare I've had mailing lists deliver value. For most open source projects, the correct way has been to find the backchannel - the mailing list is only a source of frustration and bikesheds. You must either contact maintainers personally or find an IRC or other real time method.

enneff 13y ago
Those sound like dysfunctional projects, to me.
- jaggederest 13y ago
  My typical experience is pick one or two of: A) Message gets ignored, no response B) Other people respond with the same problem, no solutions C) Unhelpful response detailing the solution to some superficially similar but unrelated problem D) Excoriating reply about how that is not really a problem because I am bad at life and/or not supposed to be using it for that. E) Discussion pace on the topic rapidly log-descent-curves into zero without anything really being resolved but lots of time being spent. F) Discussion on the mailing list is so high volume that trying to pay attention to it is akin to drinking from a firehose, and a solution is posted in an unobtrusive way 330 messages later. This is even true when attempting to make meaningful contributions of time and energy, money, or both.
simias 13y ago
I never understood why mailing lists prosper when newsgroups are mostly dead. Newsgroups are mailing lists done right (or rather, mailing lists are newsgroups done wrong).
- pestaa 13y ago
  Care to elaborate? I tried to research why Usenet was superior to more recent communication channels, but my Google fu fails me every time.
  - agilebyte 13y ago
    It has binaries?
    - riquito 13y ago
      Yes, in the form of base64
      - agilebyte 13y ago
        Thought it was uuencode or yenc.
  - 4ad 13y ago
    Usenet was superior because the average IQ was higher and people more knowledgeable. A normal consequence of access being technologically limited to academia and very tech-savvy people.
    - dsr_ 13y ago
      Usenet is superior because it evolved to handle large scale discussions properly. These include: - user agents that thread properly - long expiration times for local caches (spools) - cultural norms (that differed from group to group) about replies, new posts, quoting, and FAQs - groups are folders: the participant needs to make a decision to subscribe to a group, and then each time to read one group at a time, rather than trying to handle a dozen different groups in date-received order - and for a mixed blessing, search over the current spool was reasonably easy but general search was hard or impossible.
      - hengheng 13y ago
        ... all of which reddit (and to a lesser extent, slashdot and disqus) do just as well.
        4ad 13y ago
        Comparing Usenet or even mailing list cultural posting norms with Reddit is asinine. I still don't know how I can pipe a reddit comment into patch(1) or git(1). I can do that easily with mbox files (which can come from SMTP or nntp-to-mbox.pl(1) or something).
- Shish2k 13y ago
  > I never understood why mailing lists prosper when newsgroups are mostly dead Spam, AFAIK. I don't know why, but spam on mailing lists seems relatively rare, compared to usenet which was ~99% spam last time I looked.
  - smackfu 13y ago
    > I don't know why, but spam on mailing lists seems relatively rare Mailing lists have a central place where all messages come in, and that can ban spammers. Usenet is distributed and messages come from everywhere, so any spam protections needs to be done in the client.
alextingle 13y ago
Well, I'm with him. If you are trying to work collaboratively, mailing lists are absolutely the best way to get stuff done.
- 4ad 13y ago
  Yes, I agree. From my experience I learned that: 1) First hand, official documentation is the only one that matters. No blog posts. Some projects have very bad, or inexistent documentation, but those are probably not worth using anyway. I have found software and documentation quality to be very strongly correlated. 2) If you want to participate, or you have a deep problem that can't be solved by reading the documentation, mailing lists are the way to go. Web forums, stackoverflow and similar things are an awful waste of time. Do your homework before posting to a mailing list. If you send HTML emails and/or you don't fmt(1) or par(1) your email, you will be ignored. 3) IRC is great for social interaction. Sometimes you'll solve a minor problem on IRC, but that's not what it's for. You can learn a lot on IRC just by listening to other people talk about technology.
- bonaldi 13y ago
  Forums are far better. Mailing lists seem like a hack to do forum-type stuff over email. Still using a mailing list nowadays is like using that web-to-email gateway Stallman uses.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Why? Mailing lists have a common UI (your email client), they are easier to archive locally, messages are processable entities (can be easily tagged, filtered, forwarded, etc) and they can be used when the service is offline. The only thing missing in a mailing list is a good archive for new members; the web UIs are usually terrible. Personally, I wish I could just get an archive file (zip, tar, etc) of a certain period of time.
    - bonaldi 13y ago
      I think "a good archive for new members" is more important than just the "only" suggests. The reason it's lacking shows the problem with mailing lists: they restrict participation to those who were members at the time. Yes, there's a limited ability to have search after the fact, but most of the web UIs are awful, and the search is weak. Worse still is if you join late and somehow find a thread from 2010, there's no way to revive it with updated information or corrections. So the archives suffer terribly from bitrot, in some cases sending latecomers down the wrong path for years to come. In a well-designed forum, by contrast, threads "live" forever. When something useful needs to be said or asked, a thread can spring back to life. As a result, their archives remain useful for longer, and they don't need to suffer nearly as much from newcomers asking the same old FAQs, either. To boot, with the right forum, you can also have posts sent to your email, for all the local benefits you mention.
xioxox 13y ago
I like to use gmane to browse projects' mailing lists and post to them. I use a NNTP client to do this. It's great when it works, except for the few cases where posting is broken (seems to be mostly google groups lists). On the website of my project I point users to the blog-like interface to gmane, which can be used to browse and post to a list: http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.veusz.general http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.veusz.general
dasil003 13y ago
According to your bio you are a coder, so let me ask you this: have you never found an answer to a tech question in a mailing list archive?
- jaggederest 13y ago
  A mailing list archive is a web site that happens to draw content from a mailing list. Of course that's useful - good documentation is important. Is the best way to write that documentation a mailing list? I seriously doubt it. And that said, I'm not discussing 'googling for mailing list archives to solve problems', I'm discussing 'attempting to email the list to solve problems'.
jzzskijj 13y ago
it's extremely rare I've had mailing lists deliver value According to my memory and browsing history in this week I've been able to find solutions to issues in Emacs, Doxygen and Cygwin by Googling and ending up to their relevant mailing-list threads. It is awesome that mailing-lists get archived and the problems (and solutions) other people had can be queried. Sure, I wasn't the first person to encounter these issues, so they had been already found and circumvented. Anyway, the issues/questions had been sent to mailing-list and they had been answered. If mailing-lists didn't work, I wonder why Linux kernel manages to evolve at all. Sure, mailing lists aren't Stack Overflow where you get karma and gold medals for providing solutions.

enneff 13y ago

Those sound like dysfunctional projects, to me.

jaggederest 13y ago
My typical experience is pick one or two of: A) Message gets ignored, no response B) Other people respond with the same problem, no solutions C) Unhelpful response detailing the solution to some superficially similar but unrelated problem D) Excoriating reply about how that is not really a problem because I am bad at life and/or not supposed to be using it for that. E) Discussion pace on the topic rapidly log-descent-curves into zero without anything really being resolved but lots of time being spent. F) Discussion on the mailing list is so high volume that trying to pay attention to it is akin to drinking from a firehose, and a solution is posted in an unobtrusive way 330 messages later. This is even true when attempting to make meaningful contributions of time and energy, money, or both.

simias 13y ago

I never understood why mailing lists prosper when newsgroups are mostly dead. Newsgroups are mailing lists done right (or rather, mailing lists are newsgroups done wrong).

pestaa 13y ago
Care to elaborate? I tried to research why Usenet was superior to more recent communication channels, but my Google fu fails me every time.
- agilebyte 13y ago
  It has binaries?
  - riquito 13y ago
    Yes, in the form of base64
    - agilebyte 13y ago
      Thought it was uuencode or yenc.
- 4ad 13y ago
  Usenet was superior because the average IQ was higher and people more knowledgeable. A normal consequence of access being technologically limited to academia and very tech-savvy people.
  - dsr_ 13y ago
    Usenet is superior because it evolved to handle large scale discussions properly. These include: - user agents that thread properly - long expiration times for local caches (spools) - cultural norms (that differed from group to group) about replies, new posts, quoting, and FAQs - groups are folders: the participant needs to make a decision to subscribe to a group, and then each time to read one group at a time, rather than trying to handle a dozen different groups in date-received order - and for a mixed blessing, search over the current spool was reasonably easy but general search was hard or impossible.
    - hengheng 13y ago
      ... all of which reddit (and to a lesser extent, slashdot and disqus) do just as well.
      - 4ad 13y ago
        Comparing Usenet or even mailing list cultural posting norms with Reddit is asinine. I still don't know how I can pipe a reddit comment into patch(1) or git(1). I can do that easily with mbox files (which can come from SMTP or nntp-to-mbox.pl(1) or something).
Shish2k 13y ago
> I never understood why mailing lists prosper when newsgroups are mostly dead Spam, AFAIK. I don't know why, but spam on mailing lists seems relatively rare, compared to usenet which was ~99% spam last time I looked.
- smackfu 13y ago
  > I don't know why, but spam on mailing lists seems relatively rare Mailing lists have a central place where all messages come in, and that can ban spammers. Usenet is distributed and messages come from everywhere, so any spam protections needs to be done in the client.

alextingle 13y ago

Well, I'm with him. If you are trying to work collaboratively, mailing lists are absolutely the best way to get stuff done.

4ad 13y ago
Yes, I agree. From my experience I learned that: 1) First hand, official documentation is the only one that matters. No blog posts. Some projects have very bad, or inexistent documentation, but those are probably not worth using anyway. I have found software and documentation quality to be very strongly correlated. 2) If you want to participate, or you have a deep problem that can't be solved by reading the documentation, mailing lists are the way to go. Web forums, stackoverflow and similar things are an awful waste of time. Do your homework before posting to a mailing list. If you send HTML emails and/or you don't fmt(1) or par(1) your email, you will be ignored. 3) IRC is great for social interaction. Sometimes you'll solve a minor problem on IRC, but that's not what it's for. You can learn a lot on IRC just by listening to other people talk about technology.
bonaldi 13y ago
Forums are far better. Mailing lists seem like a hack to do forum-type stuff over email. Still using a mailing list nowadays is like using that web-to-email gateway Stallman uses.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Why? Mailing lists have a common UI (your email client), they are easier to archive locally, messages are processable entities (can be easily tagged, filtered, forwarded, etc) and they can be used when the service is offline. The only thing missing in a mailing list is a good archive for new members; the web UIs are usually terrible. Personally, I wish I could just get an archive file (zip, tar, etc) of a certain period of time.
  - bonaldi 13y ago
    I think "a good archive for new members" is more important than just the "only" suggests. The reason it's lacking shows the problem with mailing lists: they restrict participation to those who were members at the time. Yes, there's a limited ability to have search after the fact, but most of the web UIs are awful, and the search is weak. Worse still is if you join late and somehow find a thread from 2010, there's no way to revive it with updated information or corrections. So the archives suffer terribly from bitrot, in some cases sending latecomers down the wrong path for years to come. In a well-designed forum, by contrast, threads "live" forever. When something useful needs to be said or asked, a thread can spring back to life. As a result, their archives remain useful for longer, and they don't need to suffer nearly as much from newcomers asking the same old FAQs, either. To boot, with the right forum, you can also have posts sent to your email, for all the local benefits you mention.

xioxox 13y ago

I like to use gmane to browse projects' mailing lists and post to them. I use a NNTP client to do this. It's great when it works, except for the few cases where posting is broken (seems to be mostly google groups lists). On the website of my project I point users to the blog-like interface to gmane, which can be used to browse and post to a list: http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.veusz.general http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.veusz.general

dasil003 13y ago

According to your bio you are a coder, so let me ask you this: have you never found an answer to a tech question in a mailing list archive?

jaggederest 13y ago
A mailing list archive is a web site that happens to draw content from a mailing list. Of course that's useful - good documentation is important. Is the best way to write that documentation a mailing list? I seriously doubt it. And that said, I'm not discussing 'googling for mailing list archives to solve problems', I'm discussing 'attempting to email the list to solve problems'.

jzzskijj 13y ago

it's extremely rare I've had mailing lists deliver value According to my memory and browsing history in this week I've been able to find solutions to issues in Emacs, Doxygen and Cygwin by Googling and ending up to their relevant mailing-list threads. It is awesome that mailing-lists get archived and the problems (and solutions) other people had can be queried. Sure, I wasn't the first person to encounter these issues, so they had been already found and circumvented. Anyway, the issues/questions had been sent to mailing-list and they had been answered. If mailing-lists didn't work, I wonder why Linux kernel manages to evolve at all. Sure, mailing lists aren't Stack Overflow where you get karma and gold medals for providing solutions.