Ingebrigtsen: The End of Gmane? [LWN.net]

Ingebrigtsen: The End of Gmane?

Posted Jul 28, 2016 16:11 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (guest, #2582)
Parent article: Ingebrigtsen: The End of Gmane?

I get that this was a very useful service for many lists and for many people. But I always found it annoying when LWN linked to it when the primary archive used some more friendly web interface, such as mailman. If the target audience was nntp users, well, how many of those are around anyway?

The DDOS is another matter -- could be something serious, could be something personal (and if so scary), could be some random script kiddie.

Hope gmane has backups in some form that can be mirrored elsewhere...

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Ingebrigtsen: The End of Gmane?

Posted Jul 28, 2016 16:20 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I use NNTP because I don't want a firehose of email directly into my inbox. Also, the Gmane interface is *way* better than Mailman if you want to go through a thread. Mailman only indents so many times and (I believe) will not link across months, so you need to keep figuring out what is going on. Plus, it show what messages you've already read.

DDoS against FOSS infrastructure has been happening recently (spam accounts/edits on Fedora infrastructure, our company Gitlab instance got hit by Quickbooks spam, and I heard of other stories), so I wouldn't be surprised if this is just another step in that event.

Ingebrigtsen: The End of Gmane?

Posted Jul 28, 2016 17:57 UTC (Thu) by broonie (subscriber, #7078) [Link]

The web interface is very widely used for lists, I've personally never seen anything that matches thread.gmane.org in terms of ease of use (with the windowed view of the thread structure in a top pane and the message below).

Ingebrigtsen: The End of Gmane?

Posted Jul 28, 2016 18:36 UTC (Thu) by lacos (guest, #70616) [Link] (3 responses)

> But I always found it annoying when LWN linked to it when the primary archive used some more friendly web interface, such as mailman.

Calling mailman a "more friendly" web UI than the threaded view of Gmane bears witness to such a distorted world view that I can't even begin to address it.

Mailman 2 is workable, but severely limited; Gmane beats it hands down.

Mailman 3 / HyperKitty is both a step backwards relative to Mailman 2, and a new absolute bottom in usability (evidenced by the new Fedora mailing list archives, which are atrocious). It doesn't even make sense to compare Mailman 3 to Gmane.

Gmane is the best mailing list archive on the web. Its ability to locate archived message by message-id (regardless of how many lists the message has been cross-posted to!), its threaded view (which integrates discussions across partially cross-posted mailing lists), its permanent links into the threaded view with a specific message focused, and its machine-friendly raw download URLs will be *hugely* missed.

Ingebrigtsen: The End of Gmane?

Posted Jul 28, 2016 19:22 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

I concur. However, donating money to Lars is unlikely to help here: his problem is stress and lack of time, and neither are easily donatable.

Ingebrigtsen: The End of Gmane?

Posted Jul 28, 2016 22:35 UTC (Thu) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link] (1 responses)

I wonder if donating server time/infrastructure might help, though?

gmane.org is down, but IIRC one of the questions on the FAQ was "what hardware does gmane run on" and the answer was a photograph of a dinky server closet using a few ageing Opterons that was running in Lars' day job office.

Maybe some dedicated hosting might be appreciated? gmane was a fantastic asset to the community, it deserves resilient hosting, and Lars deserves a hand with running it...

Ingebrigtsen: The End of Gmane?

Posted Jul 29, 2016 8:57 UTC (Fri) by peake (guest, #109863) [Link]

Gmane looks like it could benefit greatly from Google's Project Shield[1][2]. It doesn't fit their criteria for a qualifying site exactly, but perhaps Google could be persuaded to make an exception for such a valuable service.

[1] https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/public/
[2] https://jigsaw.google.com/products/project-shield/