Jason Clements <[email protected]> wrote:
> It seems to be the majority view that all the action takes place on
> Mersenne fora, rather than this mailing list.
A comparison of average daily activity would easily show that the slowest day
at mersenneforum.org has more activity that the fastest days on this list,
IMO. OTOH, several subfora there are devoted to active topics never (or hardly
ever) discussed on this list, such as other prime-related distributed computing
projects initiated by GIMPS participants, other non-prime-related number
theory, other non-number-theory mathematics, and a _wide_ range of
non-mathematical topics.
It is true that even George Woltman has announced and discussed some software
revisions (of less import than v4->v5 or v24->v25) only at mersenneforum.org,
without always copying such announcements to this list.
> is there a possibility of a digest being posted to the list ?
When mersenneforum.org began to challenge/supplant this list as the primary
GIMPS communication medium, I tried for a short time to post, to this list,
summaries of the GIMPS-related discussion there. It quickly became too much
work for me.
I don't know of any means of "automatically" generating such a digest for daily
transmission to this list, but the PHP forum software does have some features
which make it possible to quickly determine whether there have been any new
posts to any particular subforum, or any particular thread, of special interest.
When you log in, along the left side are icons flagging all subfora that have
new posts since you last read the threads. The forum software keeps track of
exactly which threads you have read (or have requested to be marked as read),
and then flags each thread that gets a new post after that time (even while you
are still logged-on but browsing other threas). So it's a matter of seconds to
visually see where there are new postings in subfora of interest to you.
Furthermore, you can "subscribe" to particular threads. Then, with one click
to go to your "Con
el", you are presented with a list of all your subscribed threads, in _any_
subforum, which have had new posts since you last read that thread.
Furthermore, you can elect whether to have e-mail notification (instant, daily,
or weekly) of new posts to your subscribed threads and whether to automatically
subscribe to any thread in which you yourself have posted. (I have that last
option on, so I've accumulated over 500 subscribed threads. But right now, for
instance, only 7 of them have had new posts since I last read the thread. I
should go through the old subscriptions and cull a few hundred.)
> Or at least any important announcements re discoveries
George Woltman always announces all new Mersenne prime discoveries to this list
as well as in the forum. However, just before recent discoveries some folks
have picked up clues (from the hourly server reports) that something is about
to be announced, so there has been pre-announcement forum discussion and
speculation that was not copied to this list.
> and software updates ?
Let me suggest that this list's participants discuss how much announcement of
software updates they want (i.e., what's the threshold of update magnitude) to
be made to this list, in addition to the forum (where even the most minor
updates/fixes are announced).
Subscribing (see above) to a forum thread that discusses software revisions
would allow you to get e-mail notifications of new posts to it. However, if a
forum thread is newly started to discuss revisions, there is not AFAIK a method
for being automatically notified by e-mail.
Suggestion: Perhaps list participants could petition George to maintain a fixed
set of forum threads for new software announcements, so that anyone here who
subscribes to those particular threads could be automatically e-mail-notified
of those announcements. :-)
Richard Woods
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