Vivek,
On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 10:19:00AM -0400, Vivek Khera wrote:
> >>>>> "JCL" == J C Lawrence <J> writes:
> JCL> The value of GMane is primarily not to list owners, but to list
> JCL> readers/members. GMans gives them:
>
>
> My take on this is that they're pulling the "protected" world of
> mailing lists back to the swamp called usenet. Back when you could
> scan and read *all* of usenet in 30 minutes in the morning, it was
> good. When it became the free-for-all pit of cluelessness, the
> clueful retreated to mailing lists, where there is a slightly higher
> threshhold for participating. Now, gmane wants to pull them back,
> apparently kicking and screaming.
Uh, I think this is a bit of an exaggeration -- gmane isn't tied to any sort
of usenet feed and hasn't leaked into "regular ol" usenet.
> If people wanted newsgroups, they'd have them instead of mailing
> lists. Just because your mail reading software sucks, doesn't mean
> you need to pull the whole community into the usenet view of things.
gmane isn't the only or the first entity to funnel mailing lists into an NNTP
spool/server, it's just the most public.
There are several advantages to reading mailing lists via NNTP (note that I am
saying nothing about usenet) even beyond sucky MUAs. Some that I find useful
are:
- messages are stored server side (ie. pull of just the headers by readers is
far more efficient than a push of the entire message by a mailing list)
- gmane uses several techniques to protect email addresses from harvesting,
far better than most web-based mailing list archives (and you can still reply
to those messages after an interactive confirmation)
- very few MUAs have a innate concept of "catch-up" (the one I know of, GNUS,
was written by the guy who runs gmane)
- instead of a procmail-type filtering mechanism, the binning of messages is
done once, on the server side, for everyone
- killfiles and scoring are far more prevalent in newsreaders than MUAs
- gmane archival of mailing lists is far easier to search and navigate than a
web-browser based archive -- try responding to an email in the web-based
archives while preserving headers and not having to cut-and-paste
- I'm hearing an objection to the content of usenet, not the alternative
mechanism of NNTP to read large, threaded message discussions
Please let me know if I'm missing something,
Adi
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