http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/06/18/2247226/ask-slashdot-best-solution-for-an-email-discussion-forum
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John3 writes "For the past 15+ years I've maintained The
Hardlines Digest (URL omitted to reduce the /. effect), an email
discussion list for members of the retail hardware and lumber
business. Since the beginning I've run the list on a Windows box
running Lyris Listmanager, and it's worked admirably over the
years. However, the list now has over 2,600 members and
Listmanager doesn't have a nice web interface for users that like
to read via their browser. Listmanager also doesn't handle
attachments and HTML formatting well for the daily 'digest'
version of the discussions. Finally, I'd really like to move
hosting off-site so I don't need to maintain the server. The list
members are hardware store owners and many are technically
challenged, so I need to keep change to a minimum and make it
easy for them to migrate. I've considered Google Groups and that
seems to have most of the features I need. Are there any other
low cost solutions for hosting a large discussion list?"
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later in discussion
The D programming language people have successfully combined a
mailing list and tradition web forum into one. What's more, the
web forum is lightning fast to boot (fastest ever forum I've ever
used - why can't phpBB etc. be that fast?).
The exact specifics are unknown to me, but from what I've heard,
they've done a terrific job:
http://forum.dlang.org/ [dlang.org]
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later in discussion
Sweet Jesus Fuck that is fast.
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later in discussion
Vladimir Panteleev (aka CyberShadow) has mentioned some of the
reasons why it's so fast at ycombinator [ycombinator.com]:
* Optimized and deflated static resources
* Deflated HTML output
* SQLite prepared statements
* Integrated HTTP server (although it's currently in front of an
Apache proxy)
* An optimized string builder
(https://github.com/CyberShadow/DAppenderResearch)
* RAM cache of frequent DB queries
A Reddit story exists too where he speaks more about it:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ppre5/the_new_d_online_forum_software_written_in_d/#c3rhk2i
[reddit.com]
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more stuff
