[KLUG Members] have we ever considered running a forum?

[Peter Buxton]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 04:40:12PM -0400, Bruce Smith was only escaped
   alone to tell thee:

> > What's online suffers from lack of usability and functionality.
> > 
> > Links to the archives are buried so deep in the site as to be terra
> > incognito to most people.
> 
> That's why most browsers support a feature called "bookmarks".  :-)
> </smart-a$$>
> 
> Although I'm not against creating other links to the archives to make
> them easier to find.

Personally, I feel a webforum would be underused. Our answers to
questions aren't in the kind of format that would be congenial to such
browse/replies.

(And the thought of meta-moderating KLUGdot is making my palms sweat,
FYI.)

Consider the following example. Adam posts some answer I find
interesting. I leave it in my KLUG mail folder. Some months later, I am
using his mail, as I thought I would, but am having problems. I simply
"list reply" to his old email, and am provided with a nice context for
my questions. Meanwhile, everyone else would have deleted his email,
saving their own HD space.

On a web forum, Adam's post to the original story/topic would be long
expired/buried/hard to find. I don't think that's a Good Thing.
Improving our mailing list archives might be better.

As one feature, is it possible to subscribe to the list as a
non-receiving member? That way, such a member could web browse the
archive on demand, yet still mail in a question without having that
email held and examined as from an unsubscribed email address.

> > The forum itself is difficult to read (why is the forum title on
> > every single email title?).  
> 
> I don't know.  It's stock/out-of-the box Mailman (list.org).  I have
> no time or desire to dig into the Mailman source code, but feel free
> and send them your updates.

Please note the following:

From: bill <bill@billtron.com>
To: members@kalamazoolinux.org
Subject: Re: [KLUG Members] have we ever considered running a forum?

I'm not surprised if that bracketed text in the Subject: line is used by
Pipermail to create the thread views. At least it deletes the "Re: "!
(And yes, I think it's too wordy as well.)

Perhaps we shouldn't label the lists in the Subject: line. Does Mailman
have a conf option to turn that off? I sort the KLUG mail into its own
folder, but not each list I belong to (members, novice, hardware,
advocacy), and I sort the KLUG mail out using the List-Id: header:

* ^List-Id.*(members|novice|advocacy|hardware)@kalamazoolinux\.org

which would be unchanged. Perhaps visual sorting of KLUG mail would work
better if we used:

To: "KLUG Members" <members@kalamazoolinux.org>

as our To: line, and left the Subject: line unchanged.

> > If there's a search mechanism for it, it too is buried. 
> 
> I don't think so!  It's on the FRONT PAGE.   :-)
> 
> See the box& link on the bottom of the left hand column?  It says
> "Search", and searches the entire site, including the mailing list
> archives.
> 
> We use google's free service as our search engine, so new additions
> are not immediately available on the search results, (until google
> re-indexes us) but it is fairly current.

Is it possible to query Google in such a way as to limit the search not
only to www.kalamazoolinux.org, but also to:

www.kalamazoolinux.org/pipermail/members/2003-June

We could then add a footer to the archive views that would search in
that month or that list only.

If anyone wants to help, or merely to merge my changes to the current
KLUG configs, I'd be willing to work on this.

-- 
-96
I'm obsessed with mental hygiene.