Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be. [LWN.net]

Parties?

Posted Mar 19, 2010 0:21 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (2 responses)

I hate parties.

Mailing lists?

Posted Mar 19, 2010 0:33 UTC (Fri) by robla (subscriber, #424) [Link] (1 responses)

What do you think of mailing lists?

Mailing lists?

Posted Mar 19, 2010 1:04 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

Quieter, but annoying in other ways.

I don't expect to accomplish anything at parties. Most people who try to accomplish anything (other than... you know) at parties are avoided (and most of them, too). I think the dynamic Luis probably is after, although it's less fun to say so, is found at workshops.

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 4:42 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

quote: If youve got similar mixes of people, why then do parties usually handle boors well, while mailing lists often fail and flame out?

this has a very simple answer, mailing lists are a single channel of communication, it's like having everyone at a party have to say everything through a PA system that drowns everyone else out while they are talking

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 5:00 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (2 responses)

You don't have a 'kill thread' button in your Email client to silence the megaphone on the other side of the room?

I must confess I don't either ... I use to have one in emacs/vm but I changed to claws-mail and cannot find the kill-thread button. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 5:19 UTC (Fri) by nirik (subscriber, #71) [Link] (1 responses)

In claws mail:

right click on the email subject, select "Mark" and then "Ignore Thread".
Done.

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 23, 2010 3:34 UTC (Tue) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

Thanks! I can even bind that to 'k' ... though it doesn't skip forward to the next non-deleted message, so it isn't quite perfect. A step in the right direction though.

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 5:13 UTC (Fri) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (20 responses)

I think it is very revealing that all the people expressing interest in this topic
have LWN subscriber numbers < 1000. Mailing lists are used by, understood
by, and preferred by old farts and grey beards and people who can remember
using usenet for things other than porn and piracy. Everybody else prefers
web forums.

Mailing lists vs forums

Posted Mar 19, 2010 6:06 UTC (Fri) by robla (subscriber, #424) [Link] (5 responses)

Guilty as charged, but still....can you name a significant open source
effort that doesn't use a mailing list for team communication? Forums are
great for drive-by participants, but not-so-great for core contributors.

Mailing lists vs forums

Posted Mar 19, 2010 11:54 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (4 responses)

It's the other way around. Web forums *especially* suck for drive-by participants (this includes, but is not limited to, phpbb and bugzilla), because they have to register just to post their single patch. And most web forums don't even allow to unsubscribe, let alone having to remember a password.

At a good mailing list, you can just say "now I'm in" and "now I'm out". There is usually no password (or you can ignore it). You don't have to remember your username after three years of inactivity (I think I now have four accounts at the gcc bugzilla).

Some webpages you can still browse with w3m somehow, others you can't because their <table> is configured in an awkward way or they rely on Javascript or some whack. With MLs, I can use the client of my choice, even text-mode if I desire so.

Mailing lists vs forums

Posted Mar 19, 2010 17:59 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (3 responses)

I think robla referred to read access: web forums are better for passersby to read because information tends to be more accessible, while mailing lists are better for threaded information but suck to follow conversations. For write access mailing lists may be better for casual visitors (many allow even posting without registration), while forums... well, they suck anyway. With good mailing list -> web converters you have the best of both worlds.

Mailing lists vs forums

Posted Mar 20, 2010 7:39 UTC (Sat) by robla (subscriber, #424) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, actually, I was talking about write access for drive-by users as
well. While it's true that mailing lists can be configured any way, the
dominant way to configure them these days is to only allow members to post,
and I think the dominant mailing list manager is still Mailman, which does
have a password regime very similar to forums.

So, mailing list process:
1. Send mail to mailing list
2. Watch it bounce because I'm not a member, or worse, see it get held in
the moderation queue which may very easily also have 600 pieces of spam
that the administrator is never going to read.
3. Grudgingly sign up for mailing list
4. Send email
5. Filter out 15 pieces of email on the latest flamewar to erupt over the
new variable naming standard
6. Get response
7. Filter out 20 more emails because I forgot to unsubscribe
8. Go to the unsubscribe link...realize that I forgot the throwaway
password I used
9. Do the password recovery dance and unsubscribe

Compare that to forums:
1. Get an account
2. Check "[x] No email"
3. Ask question
4. Check back a few times over the course of a couple days
5. Get response
6. Forget my password, which is ok because I'm not sure I'm ever going to
need it again.

It's all a matter of taste, but as a community manager, I got schooled on
this one. I was a big mailing list bigot myself, and had to be convinced
to use forums for some things. Having the forums turned out to be a better
way to communicate with users of the project. Mailing list subscription
just has more perceived friction than forum signup, even if they're roughly
equivalent complexity.

Mailing lists vs forums

Posted Mar 20, 2010 7:54 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

The answer is obviously: well, don't configure your list so only subscribers can send mail, and tend to moderation chores as soon as possible. I run a low volume mailing list this way; maybe running one with thousands of subscribers is hard to do.

There is something I dislike about mailing lists which is having to decide each time if I send mail to sender, to list, to sender cc list, to sender and everyone else cc list... Each list has its own policy (which I can't find anywhere) and each subscriber has a different policy too: "Don't CC me, I'm on the list", "Please CC me as I'm not subscribed" and I can't ever remember which is which. Hey, get a good mail reader which keeps threads together and ignores duplicates!

Mailing lists vs forums

Posted Mar 20, 2010 11:58 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link]

>While it's true that mailing lists can be configured any way, the dominant way to configure them these days is to only allow members to post, and I think the dominant mailing list manager is still Mailman, which does have a password regime very similar to forums.

You are being unfair on the mailing list process. Sourceforge for example is a large platform that uses Mailman, and so even trying step 1 and 2 is like people sending "unsubscribe" messages to linux-kernel@ rather than majordomo@. To unsubscribe from Mailman, you don't need a password that is, if you do the unsubscribe by mail rather than going through the extra hassle of the web interface.

Compare with forums:
7. Iff you need it again, you'll have to do the password recovery dance.
8. Filter out all the newsletter stuff they send you anyway.

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 6:32 UTC (Fri) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]

Are you kidding? I could never use a pull-model.

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 7:52 UTC (Fri) by riddochc (guest, #43) [Link] (1 responses)

Hey, who you callin' old and grey? I'm younger than my subscriber number, so nyeh. ;)

Some grey.

Posted Mar 25, 2010 6:06 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

I, also, am younger than my subscriber number.

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 11:34 UTC (Fri) by Webexcess (guest, #197) [Link] (3 responses)

That's interesting. I have seen more resistance to using my open source project's mailing list from new users recently. It never occurred to me that people might actually prefer a web forum (I usually can't stand the things). Maybe I need to get with the times...

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 13:56 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

A tridirectional forum<->mailing list<->NNTP gateway would be nice. I suppose that's basically what gmane is :)

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 22, 2010 15:55 UTC (Mon) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link]

This arrangement is what Mozilla uses - our own listserver, Giganews newsgroups and Google Groups for the web.

Gerv

Mailing lists and a few other communication media

Posted Apr 1, 2010 17:50 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

Gmane is of course more (add public archive, search and directory at least); IIRC Phorum was able to itegrate a web forum, a mailig list and a newsgroup.

PS: my take is: MLs aren't (and shouldn't be) parties; the most vocal "antiracists" are the most historically proven racists themselves; and... and people are people, bytes are bytes, and live communication differs a lot from not being able to see one's eyes. So the article seems like yet another failure, at least on this topic.

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 11:38 UTC (Fri) by pcampe (guest, #28223) [Link] (1 responses)

Where do you get the subscription number of a LWN subscriber?

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 14:24 UTC (Fri) by nosnilmot (subscriber, #746) [Link]

> Posted Mar 19, 2010 11:38 UTC (Fri) by pcampe (subscriber, #28223) [Link]
> Where do you get the subscription number of a LWN subscriber?
At the top of the comment(s) they post.

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 11:48 UTC (Fri) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]

> Everybody else prefers web forums.

Which is a good reason for using mailing lists :)
Have you ever tried to have a technical discussion when everybody else is yelling gibberish? Have you seen the signal to noise ratio on sites like linuxquestions.org or fedoraforum.org?

There is some benefit in raising the barrier to entry so that you exclude people who can't use a mail client or subscribe to a list!

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 14:28 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

People actually prefer web forums? Yowzers.

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 17:25 UTC (Fri) by da4089 (subscriber, #1195) [Link] (1 responses)

I subscribe to literally hundreds of mailing lists. Their content appears nicely organised in my inbox(es) every day, I'm able to manage it using a single consistent user interface, I can save stuff I want to keep, and I can manipulate the messages using any of the hundreds of tools available.

Web forums typically require Yet Another Login, and even if I am able to get an RSS feed for them with full content, if I want to reply, I need to get a new browser tab, and then deal with whatever strange UI they use to actually post something. To say nothing of the site changing their forum software and losing all the old posts, the spammers (which I can't manage when the site doesn't deal with it), the inability to pipe the content through external tools (patch, etc), etc.

FWIW, the irony of bitching about web forums in a (ahem) web forum is not lost on me.

Not your usual web forum

Posted Mar 19, 2010 18:03 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

LWN is a special kind of web forum: threads are easy to follow (as on mailing lists), signal-to-noise ratio is high so you don't need to hide conversations, and it kindly notifies you by mail when people answer to your post. Even so, conversations are not easy to follow in time, between successive visits.

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 22, 2010 15:57 UTC (Mon) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link]

Man, web forums suck. No good "mark as read" at all. No "mark thread as read". No "ignore person". And you have to keep going back to them, and every different site has a different UI.

Mailing lists are a bit better, but subscription management is still a pain, and you have to set up filters manually to put all the mail somewhere.

The newsgroup interface is so the way to go. No-one has invented anything better yet IMO.

Gerv

Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 7:27 UTC (Fri) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

Easy. Mailing lists are essentially one -> many. On a technical mailing
list, say debian-devel :) , discussion may be tightly focussed. Context is
missing, you've got a minimalist text. Post something violently off-topic
and you'll potentially get flamed. Others will just ignore you / skip over
your name in a thread. Say something on topic which is ad hominem or can be
interpreted as an attack on one person's views - you'll get some pitching
in to defend that person, others directly flaming you, others flaming the
amount of flames and bandwidth used up. Context is all. Occasionally,
something fairly minor can push someone to say "Not worthwhile". Forums are
generally understood to have wider readership and may have more topics
going on. That said, I can't understand the extensive popularity of fora -
but nor can I understand the idea that one size fits all. There's also
ephemerality - I may say things one way on an archived mailing list with a
relatively limited circulation and where I can refer back to previous
discussions, something differently on an ephemeral forum, but have to think
quite carefully about a blog posting to a really wide audience

Face to voice

Posted Mar 19, 2010 11:34 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (3 responses)

At a party there's a face to every voice - and that face might be punched, so the voices tend to behave better (at least as long as the alcohol level is below a threshold). On a mailing list, this doesn't work. Same goes with queueing: at a supermarket 99.999% percent of people stand at the end of the line, while on the roads (when the faces are covered by a ton of steel and plastic) maybe one in ten driver tries to go around in an other lane or on the hard shoulder to overtake the queue.

Face to voice

Posted Mar 30, 2010 15:21 UTC (Tue) by dunlapg (guest, #57764) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually, going into the other lane (though not on the shoulder) is the
right thing to do. Using both lanes right up until the merge point means
that a 2-mile backup becomes a 1-mile backup, a 1-mile backup becomes a
half-mile backup. The lower the amount of non-construction road affected,
the better.

Though I merge in early anyway if my wife's in the car, because she doesn't
buy that argument and gets royally pissed if I "cut". :-)

totally off-topic road-way merging

Posted Mar 30, 2010 21:38 UTC (Tue) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

I think it depends very much on what you want to optimise.

If there is limited road space for the number of cars, then I agree that using all the available space is important.

However if there is excess car space then I believe it is best to merge early. Merging, as I'm sure you have noticed, is largely a very slow process. If you want to optimise for "maximum number of cars past the blockage once the blockage clears" then you want to merge early so that drivers at the head of the queue only need to think about accelerating, not merging as well.

So as a general rule: If there is space to merge early, do so. If there isn't feel free to use the extra lane (that is what it is there for).

An alternative algorithm is that red cars should be allowed to cut around queues because everyone knows that red cars are faster.

totally off-topic road-way merging

Posted Mar 31, 2010 16:35 UTC (Wed) by dunlapg (guest, #57764) [Link]

I found this article, which has some reference studies comparing
"conventional merge", "Early Merge" (encouraging motorists to merge
earlier), and "Late Merge" (encouraging motorists to merge later)
(http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/wz/workshops/accessible/McCoy.htm). Relevant
quotes:

"...simulations by Mousa et al found that early merge control strategies
increased the travel times through the work zone, because vehicles are more
likely to be delayed over greater distances by slower vehicles ahead of
them in the open lane."

"The results of these studies revealed that the conflict rates are
substantially lower with the Late Merge. At higher densities, about 75
percent fewer forced merges and 30 percent fewer lane straddles were
observed for the Late Merge; and, at densities below 25 vpm, no conflicts
were observed for the Late Merge, whereas conflicts were observed for the
conventional merge. The studies also found the capacity of the Late Merge
to be nearly 20 percent higher than that of the conventional merge."

"Conceptually the Late Mergeaddresses many of the problems that are
associated with traffic operations in advance of lane closures at work
zones on rural freeways, especially during periods of congestion. In
particular, the lengths of the queues that form as a result of congestion
are reduced by about 50 percent, because the queued vehicles are stored in
two lanes instead of only one. The shorter queue lengths reduce the
likelihood of them extending back beyond the work zone's advance warning
signs and surprising approaching drivers, which in turn reduces the
potential of rear-end accidents. In addition, driver experience less
anxiety about knowing which lane is closed, because either lane can be used
to reach the merge point. The availability of both lanes also reduces the
frustration levels of drivers. Drivers in the open lane are less likely to
be irritated by others passing by them in the closed lane, because this
maneuver is permissible with the Late Merge. Drivers are able to select
the lane with the shortest queue and not be concerned about others blocking
their path to the merge point."

The summary seemed to be: Early Merge doesn't speed anything up, can slow
things down, increases traffic backups and causes more frustration because
people are tempted to "cut" using the open lane. Late Merge speeds things
up 20% (if I understood it right), reduces the back-up, and overall reduces
frustration.

It's a matter of scale. And exclusion.

Posted Mar 19, 2010 14:13 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

Parties tend to remain fairly small. Mailing lists (especially the ones that degenerate into flamefests) tend not to be.

Also, you can always kick someone out of a party for being an ass, or not invite them for the next one. Either way you can keep them out. It's a little harder to do that with an open, public mailing list.

It's a matter of scale. And exclusion.

Posted Mar 22, 2010 17:24 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but the reason I went to parties - when I was single - was entirely different from the reason I use mailing lists :-)

It's a matter of scale. And exclusion.

Posted Mar 28, 2010 13:15 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Drink beer, dance to good music? Certainly easy on mailinglists ;-)

Meeting cool people - to a lesser extend but possible on mailinglists. The
reason you probably refer to - well, that depends on the mailinglist I
suppose :D