Well, personally I find the Backup Central forum traffic to be annoying. 
The email list existed long before the BC forum (for BackupPC) did and got 
along fine without it. Further it's an untenable practice; if every 
centralized resource wannabe created a web forum <-> email listserv 
gateway, it would get very chaotic very quickly. In short, it's "not the 
right way to do things" (tm).

I have no problem with searchable web archives of mailing lists; they can 
be quite useful. But I don't buy the "It sure isn't to generate more web 
traffic," argument. If that were true, you'd have your forum be a simple 
archive with explicit instructions how to subscribe to the *email list* to 
submit a question. If someone can't figure out how to subscribe to an email 
list, they probably shouldn't be trying to install/manage BackupPC. ;-)

Like I said, I personally find the forum traffic annoying, but it's not 
annoying enough for me to complain unless asked. That might be the same 
perspective of others, but I won't speak for them. I will say that I 
haven't been impressed with the quality of the questions or solutions from 
the users of the Backup Central forum (not saying that we don't get a lot 
of RTFM questions via the email list, but it seems the forum is responsible 
for far more than its share).

I wouldn't have said all of this unless asked, but you did ask. My opinion 
is mine, not my employer's.

On Tue, 23 Dec 2008, cpreston wrote:

> If you are on this mailing list and have an opinion about Backup Central's 
> use of this list, please read this message and respond. I'm doing what I'm 
> doing because I believe it helps the BackupPC community -- no other reason. 
> It sure isn't to generate more web traffic. (If that's all I wanted to do, I 
> could do that by setting up a one-way setup where I import the messages from 
> the list and don't send forum messages back to the list.) I believe that what 
> I'm doing is the right thing, but at least one member of the list seems to 
> feel rather strongly in the opposite direction. I thought I'd give you a 
> chance to respond to that.
>
> Holger said to another poster on a different thread:
>
>> Since you're ignoring off-list requests to stop posting to this *mailing
>> list* via "Backup Central", let me explain to you on-list, that this is a
>> MAILING LIST (shouting intended), and that you are making an utter
>> fool of yourself...
>
> So let me get this straight. I've never met you, and you've never contacted 
> me and explained what your problem is with Backup Central doing what it's 
> doing, but you've taken it upon yourself to wage an off-list email campaign 
> to tell anyone that posts on Backup Central that they should not do so.
>
> BTW, no one else has complained either. In fact, of the 15 mailing lists that 
> I've done this with (containing a grand total of well over 15,000 subscribers 
> on said mailing lists and hundreds of thousands of posts), you are the ONLY 
> one who has made it a point to do what you're doing.
>
>> You *cannot* edit previous posts.
>
> Yes you can -- if you're using a different medium other than email. And, if 
> you CAN edit a previous post to correct a misunderstanding in your question, 
> why shouldn't you? What is so evil about that? Email is a very nice medium, 
> but not everyone uses it to the degree that you do. An increasing number of 
> people prefer to reserve email for interaction with direct coworkers and 
> friends, and use the web to interact with communities like this one.
>
>> "Backup Central"s official point of view seems to be something like "we
>> only encourage fools to do stupid things, we don't make them do them;
>> if that annoys mailing lists, so what?". They obviously don't grasp the
>> basics of threading and the involved email headers, and, frankly, I
>> couldn't be bothered to explain them to them.
>
> First, Backup Central is not a "they," it's a "me." I'm ONE GUY trying to 
> manage a resource for the backup community while keeping tens of thousands of 
> people happy and apparently not doing a good job with one of them. Second, I 
> DO understand the basics of email threading, and am well acquainted with the 
> appropriate RFCs. I'm a Unix geek through and through and used to use Usenet 
> before it got popular and got all messed up.
>
> I also understand that there are a lot of users out there that don't even 
> know what a mailing list is, and wouldn't know how to join one if they needed 
> to. They wouldn't even know to look for one. But they know what forums are. 
> It is for those users that I did what I did.
>
> I could have started a SEPARATE forum, but then the forum posters wouldn't 
> gain access to the information on the list, and the list wouldn't gain access 
> to the increased exposure that the forum brings. (Every list I've done this 
> for has increased it's participation both in terms of subscribers and in 
> terms of overall posts.) I didn't want to do that, so I'm using an 
> open-source product that connects the two.
>
> Is mail2forum (the product I use) perfect? No. Have I written my own hacks to 
> the code to minimize negative impacts on mailings lists? Yes. Am I crack php 
> programmer would could make it do cartwheels? No. Have I done my best to 
> respond to those who don't like it? Absolutely. Have any of the lists where 
> I've done it taken a vote and asked me to leave? No.
>
>> It's not that it is *impossible* to follow a mutilated-by-Backup-
>> Central-type thread, it's just that it's a pain, and I, for one, don't
>> voluntarily inflict pain upon myself. I would be happy to continue simply
>> ignoring your posts and the partly incorrect or misleading answers there
>> have been, if not for the fact that all of that lands in the archives and
>> may mislead readers who have done *nothing* to deserve it.
>
> Do you yell at people that use email clients that mess up the thread as well? 
> Just curious.
>
> Apparently there's some combination of what I'm doing and what this poster is 
> doing that is driving you crazy. I _think_ it's that he's been editing 
> previous posts. The ability to edit a previous post is on by default, but I 
> have now turned it off. (In fact, I decided to do it for all forums.) See how 
> easy that was? I am neither stupid nor evil. Quit trying to make me so. I am 
> a reasonable person who responds to reasonable requests, even when they are 
> stated rather unreasonably strong, as is the case in your case.
>
> In addition, the poster to which you have sent such hateful sounding posts 
> has posted both questions AND answers to this forum and by extension your 
> mailing list. (See 
> http://www.backupcentral.com/phpBB2/search/author/Glassfox.html ) While the 
> majority of his/her posts have been questions, it seems that they are trying 
> to help as well. Maybe you could back off just a little.
>
> Then you said:
>>> Any idea what's wrong here?
>> I really couldn't care less.
>
> So you posted all that just to say that you weren't going to answer his 
> question? Now THAT'S being unreasonable.
>
> W. Curtis Preston
> AKA Backup Central
>
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------
> |This was sent by wcurtispreston AT gmail DOT com via Backup Central.
> |Forward SPAM to abuse AT backupcentral DOT com.
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
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