On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 09:19:53PM -0500, John Botscharow wrote: > Now that would be a HUGE help. I have saved every list email since I > joined and my thunderbird can search those no problem, but I've only > been a member of this list a short time, so my archive is rather limited > :-) Being able to EASILY search the entire archive would help us new > people a lot. >
You can download the entire mail archive from any Ubuntu mailing list very easily. For example for this list go to https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-marketing/ and at the top you see "download the full raw archive ( 13 MB ). ". Click the link and you get an mbox file you could import into your mail client. I generally do this for any new mailing list I join, so I can go back if needs be. > I need to clarify my earlier statement about a foru, I did not mean it > as a REPLACEMENT for the list, but rather as a SUPPLEMENTARY form of > communication. I have to say I'm not a fan of forums at all, so I'd not be in favour of this. Mailing lists and IRC work for _me_ but I understand that others (especially newer users) prefer forums. As such we will end up splitting people across 3 communication mediums, irc, mailing list and forum, as opposed to just 2. Of course there's nothing stopping people using the forums that already exist for the discussion of marketing opportunities, and indeed this does already happen, but given the fact that the marketing team doesn't seem to work effectively with the two communication methods it has, would adding another really help? > A forum allows for more flexibility in changing the topic heading than a > mailing list. That's just not true. Anyone can change the topic of a mail - all mail clients have a "subject" field. > Most people do not take the time to change the subject in > a reply that is off-topic from the original subject That's an meatspace problem, not a technical one. > and I do not know if > it can be done after the fact in a list archive, but I do know that it > can be done on a forum. We have bigger issues to worry about as a team than the subject lines of posts in my opinion. > That would make searching the archives much > easier, as well as better linking of posts on the same subject. > Whilst searching of archives is a useful task, it's not necessarily something that we need to focus on. We should be looking to the future, the tasks we need to undertake to invigorate this team, and not the many discussions that happened in the past. I think we have enough people around here with long enough memories who can recall where pertinent discussions happened in the past without everyone having to turn to google or their mail archives. > Both forums and mailing lists are only as good as the people using them. We had an interesting discussion on this topic at UDS last month. General consensus was roughly "forum people are forum people, mailing list people are mailing list people, let's not try to coerce one type to use the other medium. They will if they want to, but no need for pressure to be applied". > And how good people are is dependent on what they are comfortable with. > Your confort zone is mailing lists; mine is forums - mainly because I do > not have a mailing list on my site, but I do have a forum. And some > forums allow for email posting :-) > The ubuntuforums used to but currently don't. This is a subject that has come up many times, but I don't see it being addressed any time soon. If a forum was to be used, I'd _expect_ it to be ubuntuforums.org, and not another random forum setup just for the marketing team. Cheers, Al. -- ubuntu-marketing mailing list ubuntu-marketing@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-marketing
