LWN: Comments on "Mailman 3.0 to modernize mailing lists"

I am still looking for a bulletin board/mailinglist integration software

spinda — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 09:54:37 +0000

Groupserver does exactly this:

http://groupserver.org/

Threading on the web archive

The_Barbarian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 00:34:18 +0000

Awesome! Good to see they will work on those issues!

Threading on the web archive

sumanah — Mon, 13 Apr 2015 19:52:11 +0000

Thank you for your comment! I've filed a bug https://fedorahosted.org/hyperkitty/ticket/96 and updated a bug https://fedorahosted.org/hyperkitty/ticket/67 so the developers of HyperKitty can improve the software accordingly.

I need to find an example of this, but I have been assured that HyperKitty *will* display threads smoothly across months. If and when I find confirmation either way (that it works or that it doesn't) I'll comment here again to let you know!

I am still looking for a bulletin board/mailinglist integration software

zlynx — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 10:03:45 +0000

I had to check it out too. That is freakishly fast.

I am jealous of whoever wrote that now, because they are awesome.

I am still looking for a bulletin board/mailinglist integration software

Zenith — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 13:42:57 +0000

Wow, the speed of that forum is flat-out impressive.
I guess we are all just so used to loading times even with all the responsive designs etc that this seems outlandishly fast :-)

Mailman 3.0 to modernize mailing lists

chmouel — Sat, 04 Apr 2015 17:39:33 +0000

PUT and PATCH is unusual? maybe PATCH is relatively new but I have been using PUT forever

HyperKitty a step back in usability

mbunkus — Sat, 04 Apr 2015 07:31:37 +0000

For me forums have several drawbacks:

1. Most forum software is unthreaded. Means that you cannot easily tell which post a person is replying to; posts are simply appended at the end. It is impossible to skip whole sub-discussions if one goes off-topic. It's also extremely easy to lose track of a request or a question made a couple of posts ago if some other sub-discussion is lively and inserts a lot of messages after that request (because it's not obvious that there is an open sub-thread that hasn't been answered yet).

2. Most forum software doesn't allow me to do individual things to posts. I cannot mark a post as important, or to be answered later. I cannot move or copy a post to my folder named »important stuff«. I cannot remove posts that I consider irrelevant in order to keep the number of posts I may have to look through later small. I cannot remove obvious spam and have to rely on moderators doing their job.

In short: the forum software doesn't support me in organizing myself at all. I have to rely on external tools a lot (e.g. manage some kind of TODO list in which I use URLs pointing to individual forum posts).

3. People can often remove their own posts. While this has its use, it also has the potential to make a whole discussion seem nonsensical later on. »What the hell are all those guys replying to?« is a question I had to ask myself in the past, only because the question that was asked had been removed later by the poster.

4. Search functions vary in usefulness. There are too many forums in which it is frowned upon to have multiple topics about the same piece of software, for example. This leads to topics with literally thousands of messages, and the forum's search functionality is often not up to it. »Sent by myself between January and March with a topic that matches XYZ and the body that matches ABC« is something I can do in my email program; it's nothing I've ever been able to do properly in a forum.

5. Nefarious moderators may remove content they consider inappropriate for whatever reason. Granted, this is not often a real issue, but if you do have a personal problem with a moderator then good luck getting anything done on that forum.

HyperKitty a step back in usability

lacos — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 22:19:59 +0000

>> Web discussion forums are inappropriate for technical exchange

> Can you elaborate?

Two reasons:

(1) in conveying ideas, *form* matters. I usually take great care to lay
out my messages. I'm fully conscious about whitespace use, about what
lines up with whatever else, both vertically and horizontally, and so
on. I like to draw simple diagrams, tables, occasionally even graphs /
charts.

This is perfectly possible to do in plaintext email, and in commit
messages. However its presentation depends on monospace font.

Forum software is usually geared towards users who click the "Quote" or
"Reply" button, then (if we're lucky) jump to the end (or their cursor
is placed there by default), then emit an unkempt string of "words". If
they separate their thoughts into paragraphs, we can consider ourselves
lucky.

In short, I spend a lot of time on "form", because it is a channel to
support my thoughts. Forum software throws the form (the ASCII layout)
away, corrupting the perception of my thoughts.

Yes, yes, the forum UI might give you buttons and even some kind of
markup to insert numbered or unnumbered lists, etc. They *all* suck.
I've been a reddit user, and archlinux bbs user, and I've been on other,
much less known forums as well. They all suck.

For me, ASCII emails are the ultimate form of What You See Is What You
Get. I have simple text editor macros that help me lay out things. Doing
the same (or approximately the same...) in whatever markup might be
possible, but it takes five times the effort. Also, markup is *code*
after all, and proportional font and code do not mix.

(2) You might want to insert code snippets, patches, even attach a small
text file or binary file, *in-line* with your message. In my experience,
no forum software will *both* enable you to do that *and* keep your
content pristine.

> people these days seem to find forums more comfortable to participate
> in and do engage in technical exchanges in all sorts of places (github
> issues, IRC, LWN comments, etc) without too much harrumphing.

I've never worked with github issues.

IRC is great, but for any discussion where there's a structure to
arguments, I tend to ask people to switch to email, especially if I need
background, or would like to give them background.

I edit my bugzilla comments in my programmers' editor. I wrap them
manually at 76 characters (an empirical value).

Sometimes I need more columns for a drawing (or for "perverse" command
lines); in those cases I make a note at the top of the comment for the
reader to click "unwrap comments". Because I've manually wrapped my
flowing text anyway, this won't result in a 200 character wide wall of
text; only the diagram will take up as much horizontal space as it
needs.

I also edited this LWN comment in said editor.

... Sorry about derailing the discussion; it should have been about
Mailman 3.

In order to close this comment with something relevant: can you imagine
doing patch review (or reading it, after the fact) in anything but
plaintext?

(Yes, I know about Gerrit. I won't speak about it.)

HyperKitty a step back in usability

sjj — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 21:19:00 +0000

>> "HyperKitty looks more like a web discussion forum than Mailman 2's list-of-links archive pages"
>> and that's *exactly* its biggest problem. Web discussion forums are inappropriate for technical exchange.

Sorry if this is nitpicking but I don't get this point. Can you elaborate? One reason I can see for a web forum being inappropriate is that the messages are stored in one place only. If that goes away, the history is lost. This is true with most discussion media today. But Mailman/Hyperkitty doesn't work like that - it only looks like it from a particular angle. Is it that "things that LOOK like web discussion forums are inappropriate for technical exchange"? Most people these days seem to find forums more comfortable to participate in and do engage in technical exchanges in all sorts of places (github issues, IRC, LWN comments, etc) without too much harrumphing.

I don't think this is necessarily a good trend, but there it is. Future historians will gnash their teeth at the lack of primary sources in the crucial era of building our global information infrastructure.

Threading on the web archive

lacos — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 19:30:26 +0000

Hello fellow Gmane fan :) (See my longer message above.) You're entirely correct that Gmane introduces no arbitrary separation within a thread, just because of time difference between posts. This is indeed another reason why Gmane is more user-friendly than Mailman 2 (and consequently, more user-friendly than HiperKitty too).

HyperKitty a step back in usability

lacos — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 19:19:23 +0000

I'm not happy that I have to be another detractor here, but... Mailman 2's archive UI has always been a distant second behind the absolute winner (for me) threaded Gmane interface. And Mailman 3, based on the live demo linked in the article, is a further step back -- it moves the look & feel closer to internet forums. (Which are considered, justifiedly, gravely inferior for technical discussions.)

Compare the two user interfaces using the thread entitled "A proposal for Fedora updates":

Mailman 3 HyperKitty:

http://lists-dev.cloud.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/de...

Gmane Classic:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/2...

For me Gmane is the clear winner. Beyond the most basic functionality (ie. just catching up on the list) and the great threaded UI, it allows you to search by Message-Id:

http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?message_id=loom.20150...

it allows you to grab the raw text of a message (click Direct link at the bottom, then append /raw to the URL):

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/...

which is perfect if you want to import just one email into your MUA, and chime in on that sub-thread.

(I understand that both Gmane and HyperKitty allow people to chime in "on the web" -- while that may be convenient for simple answers, a thoughtful, longer response is usually very hard to compose in a web browser widget. (Case in point, I always have trouble commenting on LWN as well; I need to click the Preview comment button like ten times until I'm satisfied. Neither Plain text nor HTML do what my MUA would allow me to do.))

It also enables the user to restrict the view to a specific thread, and generate a stable, permanent link to one of the messages in the thread -- just select a message in the upper frame, then click the Subject field in the lower frame. Then whatever the URL bar states is your permanent link, and it comes with *full* context.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/2...

HyperKitty does provide permanent links, but they don't come with context -- the user is returned to the message, yes, but not to the location in the thread:

http://lists-dev.cloud.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/de...

The proportional font is also an unfortunate choice in my opinion (Gmane and Mailman 2 both show monospace for plaintext emails) -- it makes patches unreadable and destroys ASCII diagrams and tables. Leading space is also dropped on each line. (Some of the above messages happen to be examples for this as well.)

I apologize for promoting Gmane instead of discussing HyperKitty, but for me HyperKitty seems yet another step in the wrong direction. As the earlier LWN article referenced here, http://lwn.net/Articles/596049/ , states:

"HyperKitty looks more like a web discussion forum than Mailman 2's list-of-links archive pages"

and that's *exactly* its biggest problem. Web discussion forums are inappropriate for technical exchange.

I am still looking for a bulletin board/mailinglist integration software

mathstuf — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 14:30:23 +0000

Following some links at the footer: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

I am still looking for a bulletin board/mailinglist integration software

kay — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 12:48:56 +0000

Looks like what I was looking several years for ;-)

Is it open source in sense of free software and where can I download it?

Kay

Mailman 3.0 to modernize mailing lists

mirabilos — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 09:29:35 +0000

I did not say it was hosted there.

What I said was: it looks like it was designed to look like SF.net’s forums. The net result of that is something you already said…

Mailman 3.0 to modernize mailing lists

rriggs — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 16:01:06 +0000

SF is where open source goes to die. Their interface is showcase for "how not to design a web site", "how to frustrate collaboration" and "how to make users hate you". I dread having to rely on software hosted there.

Threading on the web archive

raimue — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 13:12:44 +0000

Modernizing the look of the web archive is just eye candy for me, but might be important for others. However, I would prefer to view the web archive like I would in a mail client with subject/sender/date columns.

Furthermore, is it still not possible to follow a thread spanning multiple months? The archive is chunked up by months and I see threads starting with "Re: ..." subjects (maybe they are just cross-posts I can't identify due to missing To/CC?).

Also when viewing a single mail, I totally miss a reference to the parent post. Shouldn't it be possible to add such a link now with stable URLs based on Message-Id and the References/In-Reply-To headers?

I usually rely on Gmane's web interface, because it is able to show the full thread even if the replies arrived multiple months apart. Pipermail in Mailman 2 just can't handle this.

Reference to last April in HypperKitty can be (is?) a little confusing

jwakely — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 12:49:30 +0000

It seems both grammatically correct and perfectly clear. This year is 2015, last year is 2014. This April is April 2015, last April is April 2014.

Mailman 3.0 to modernize mailing lists

mirabilos — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 12:21:52 +0000

Bwaaaaaaaaah *yuk* the new archives look like sourcefrog.net’s forums.

Keeping Mailman 2 for sure.

I am still looking for a bulletin board/mailinglist integration software

pboddie — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 12:48:02 +0000

The "horizontal-split" mode is rather nice.

Meanwhile, I think it's fast because unlike most other forum software, it doesn't pollute the pages with animated GIFs or - as is also the case with most Web sites these days - thousands of lines of scripts to decorate all the parts of the page after loading, play with the layout, and reinvent things like hyperlinks and the back button because the experience is not "desktop-enough" for the assumed audience otherwise.

Reference to last April in HypperKitty can be (is?) a little confusing

xyz — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 10:52:30 +0000

This is just a style note. In the sentence
"HyperKitty is a Django-based archiver application that replaces Pipermail, which we previewed last April."

the last April can be a little confusing since this article will be avaialble with the first April edition of 2015 of LWN while here the last April refers to last year's (2014) April.

Mailman 3.0 to modernize mailing lists

dskoll — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 21:21:09 +0000

Yes, I don't like the HyperKitty display, assuming that the demo site is the only way it works. I much prefer the existing static HTML Mailman archive display.

But perhaps it's possible to configure HyperKitty to display things more similarly to the old way... I'd have to play with it a bit.

RSS?

dmarti — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 17:24:46 +0000

Will there be built-in RSS? There are some lists I don't need to get in email but wouldn't mind having access to in an RSS reader. (Would also make it easier to feed announce lists to Planet sites)

The comment had to be made…

Sesse — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 13:02:55 +0000

Dropping Mailman Day? I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Mailman 3.0 to modernize mailing lists

ken — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 11:17:43 +0000

I did not like the hyperkitty thing at all. Maybe its the demo that is poorly configured or something but it was hard to follow the threads.

when looking at something like http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2015-... you can quickly see all threads and how active they are. you can search (in the browser) on subject and author. when reading the individual post you can quickly navigate to parent post or replies.

the hyperkitty interface shows only a few messages and when listing a specific subject you have a very hard time understanding who is replying to whom.

I am still looking for a bulletin board/mailinglist integration software

dlang — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 02:53:28 +0000

I responded to your comment before reading the article, nabble is the service I was thinking of.

I am still looking for a bulletin board/mailinglist integration software

dlang — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 02:51:00 +0000

FudForum integrates well with NNTP, and since mailman also integrates with NNTP you can have a good mail/forum/nntp service where the users don't have any idea what each other are using. Baen Publishing uses this (bar.baen.com)

Also, there is a company that has a commercial, hosted service that provides a forum-like interface to mailing lists. They also host interfaces for a number of opensource software packages (sometimes without the maintainers of such packages being aware of it unless they go looking)

I am still looking for a bulletin board/mailinglist integration software

josh — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 01:38:23 +0000

The new HyperKitty web interface seems like exactly what you're asking for.

I am still looking for a bulletin board/mailinglist integration software

flussence — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 01:23:17 +0000

> Coming from traditional newsgroups and mailing list background I would like to have something which bridges my traditional interfaces to the current way discussions take place on the Internet.

The D language forum (http://forum.dlang.org/) sounds like exactly what you're describing. It's actually an NNTP frontend, and fully read-write at that. The one thing that really struck me is how *fast* it is compared to... well, every other web-based forum I've ever used.

I am still looking for a bulletin board/mailinglist integration software

giggls — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 00:38:59 +0000

Nowadays people tend to use bulletin board software all over the place. Coming from traditional newsgroups and mailing list background I would like to have something which bridges my traditional interfaces to the current way discussions take place on the Internet.

Unfortunately, outside of strongly techy environments mailing lists have long gone!

So this might probably be a nice enhancement of mailman, but what we really need is something which combines the advantage of both worlds.

Sven

P.S.: I'm forced to use phpBB in a single case and I don't like it at all