Vivek, On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 10:19:00AM -0400, Vivek Khera wrote: > >>>>> "JCL" == J C Lawrence <J> writes: > JCL> The value of GMane is primarily not to list owners, but to list > JCL> readers/members. GMans gives them: > > > My take on this is that they're pulling the "protected" world of > mailing lists back to the swamp called usenet. Back when you could > scan and read *all* of usenet in 30 minutes in the morning, it was > good. When it became the free-for-all pit of cluelessness, the > clueful retreated to mailing lists, where there is a slightly higher > threshhold for participating. Now, gmane wants to pull them back, > apparently kicking and screaming.
Uh, I think this is a bit of an exaggeration -- gmane isn't tied to any sort of usenet feed and hasn't leaked into "regular ol" usenet. > If people wanted newsgroups, they'd have them instead of mailing > lists. Just because your mail reading software sucks, doesn't mean > you need to pull the whole community into the usenet view of things. gmane isn't the only or the first entity to funnel mailing lists into an NNTP spool/server, it's just the most public. There are several advantages to reading mailing lists via NNTP (note that I am saying nothing about usenet) even beyond sucky MUAs. Some that I find useful are: - messages are stored server side (ie. pull of just the headers by readers is far more efficient than a push of the entire message by a mailing list) - gmane uses several techniques to protect email addresses from harvesting, far better than most web-based mailing list archives (and you can still reply to those messages after an interactive confirmation) - very few MUAs have a innate concept of "catch-up" (the one I know of, GNUS, was written by the guy who runs gmane) - instead of a procmail-type filtering mechanism, the binning of messages is done once, on the server side, for everyone - killfiles and scoring are far more prevalent in newsreaders than MUAs - gmane archival of mailing lists is far easier to search and navigate than a web-browser based archive -- try responding to an email in the web-based archives while preserving headers and not having to cut-and-paste - I'm hearing an objection to the content of usenet, not the alternative mechanism of NNTP to read large, threaded message discussions Please let me know if I'm missing something, Adi
