[Mageia-discuss] Mailing List to Web Forum Bidirectional Gateway

Olivier Méjean omejean at yahoo.fr
Sun Oct 3 22:40:45 CEST 2010


Le dimanche 3 octobre 2010 06:25:58, Tux99 a écrit :
> I have set up a test web forum with bidirectional gateway to the
> Mageia mailing lists.
> I did this primarily to test the forum<>ML gateway functionality
> with the hope that it will be also implemented in the future
> official Mageia forum.
> 
> This forum ML gateway is in no way meant to preempt or compete with
> the future official forum, on the contrary once the official forum is
> up and running (hopefully with equivalent functionality), I expect
> to shutdown this test forum again.
> 
> The forum has already been filling up with posts since Friday
> afternoon, and it also creates automatically a forum user for every
> unique email address of senders of mailing list posts.
> 
> Therefore if you have posted on the mailing lists in the past couple
> of days, you will find that you already have a forum userid.
> If you want to make use of it, go to the forum login page, enter
> your email address (the same one you use for the mailing lists!),
> click on "forgot password" and wait to receive an email for the
> password reset procedure.
> 
> Once you have your password you can login and post messages in the
> mailing list forums, which then will also be posted to the mailing
> lists.
> 
> If you only want to use the forum to read the mailing list posts,
> then of course you don't need to register/login at all.
> 
> Please notice that the FIRST post for each user from the forum to the
> mailing lists takes about 5 minutes to get through, this is because
> the Mageia mailing lists have grey-listing active to avoid spam.
> 
> If you don't already have an automatically added userid on the forum,
> then you can register as new user, but please make sure that you use
> the SAME EMAIL ADDRESS as you used to subscribe to the mailing lists,
> otherwise your posts to the mailing list will need to be manually
> approved by the Mageia mailing list admins, which means they will
> be delayed.
> 
> Also to avoid spammers, every new user registration on the forum
> requires moderator (that would be me :) approval, so it can take
> up to 24 hours (but usually much less).
> 
> Here is the direct link to the forum members pages, look here to
> see if you already have a userid:
>  http://mageia.linuxtech.net/forum/index.php?t=finduser&usr_login=&u
> s=2&btn_submit=Find
> 
> The forum main page is here:
> http://mageia.linuxtech.net/forum/
> 
> Myself and a few others have been testing the forum in the last few
> days, so I can say it's stable and works well, but of course it hasn't
> been tested under heavy load yet, so please be gentle... :)
> (this forum is running on a relatively low power rented virtual server
> so don't expect great performance under heavy load)
> 
> If you have any problems with the forum itself, please post them in
> the dedicated sub-forum called "Forum discussion", don't post them
> here on the Mageia ML as it would be off topic.
> This sub-forum is obviously not replicated on any Mageia mailing list.
> 
> I hope it will be useful for those of us who prefer a web forum rather
> than mailing lists, but still want to  partecipate in the mailing list
> discussions!
> 

Hi there

Well, that's a great job, really, nice to see such a thing is possible.

However i would like to point something very important for me, forum users are 
quite different from ML users.

In fact, throught this system we face one goal of Mageia. Will it be a 
distribution for "developers" or for "end-users" (well i know developers are 
also end-users). End-users, well just users may come from Windows (i hope we 
will attract some to the good side of the force :D ) and they feels a forum 
must easier than a ML. Just look at rules on the ML here, no html, no top 
posting, just quote well are things that needs to use mail correctly. And just 
use mail correctly is sometimes hard for just users. I do not work in 
computing and i just see how computers are seen, how they are used and how 
theses 3 rules would be hard to use. No HTML ? well i guess few users (outside 
those working in computing) knows how to do it, no top posting ... ouch quite 
impossible, quote well ... hum what do you calll quoting ?

Let's face it, ML is a tool for developers not a tool for users. As a user i 
do prefer forums, on one topic i can have the full discussion no need to 
navigate between mails, there are colors, it is (or it give the feeling) more 
attractive and newbies or users will prefer using forums. That's the same 
thing between using GUI or CLI, i know CLI is powerful, faster, very efficient, 
but for users GUI is better, they feel at ease when using their mouse to point 
and click, validate.

I have also praticed a lot web forum, and a very little usenet and it is also 
two differents audience. Anyone here on alt.os.linux.mandriva (hum yes Marc 
Paré is on) ?

So, even if there is a good tool to have a bidirectional Gateway between ML 
and web forum i don't think we will meet efficiency with it. The best way for me 
is to have these different tools since they have different audiences, some of us 
will be on both tools but most will use just one.

-- 
Olivier Méjean
Président de l'Association des Utilisateurs Francophones de Mandriva Linux
http://mandrivafr.org
twitter : obagoom
identi.ca : goom


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