Sorry for top-posting, but my comments are in general response to your
email.
First, I certainly appreciate your reasoned and polite response along
with your attempts to minimize problems caused by the forum->email
gateway.
My main gripe though is more with the non-level playing field created
by a forum->email gateway. The fact that once in a while one sees an
annoying and/or out-of-context post is more a symptom of this
bigger issue.
Specifically, the advantage of an email list is that it forces
*everyone* to participate making it harder for the majority to
freeload by just popping in with an occasional question while leaving
it to a small dedicated few to browse the forum regularly and answer
all the questions. In other words, the "price" of being able to ask a
question is that you have to also listen to (and hopefully over time
also answer) other people's questions. Had this been simply a forum,
I too would probably have been the type of user who just stumbles by
when I have a question and then moves on once I have it all
working. Instead, over time, as I have become more experienced, I have
not only continued to learn but also started to give back when I know
an answer.
To be honest, I used to not understand this "subtlety" and wondered
why I had to join the email list just in order to post my single
question when I had no interest in seeing other people's questions --
but that's because I was missing the whole point. To get you need to give
too.
Thus, I think a forum->email gateway creates a class of (potentially)
*lazy* users who just see this as a place to ask questions rather than
give back to the community.
Instead, I would suggest a compromise. Use the forum->email gateway to
allow people to *read* threads. But require email listserv membership
in order to post.
Of course, people could subscribe to post a question and then
unsubscribe but hopefully that will be rare. I mean when I first
subscribed to ask a question, I never would have guessed that I would
still be active on the list 8 months later...
In summary, to me this is an issue not just of occasional nuisance but
simple fairness.
cpreston wrote at about 15:22:35 -0400 on Tuesday, May 26, 2009:
>
> I set up the BackupCentral forum <-> BackupPC mailing list gateway about two
> years ago, at the same time I did this for several other open-source
> products. Although not everyone on every list likes the idea, the general
> consensus on most of the lists has been that it is a Good Thing. Sure there
> are a few people that don't like it, but the vast majority realize that some
> people would rather use forums instead of email, and welcome their input to
> the community. Since this particular list happens to have a very vocal
> minority expressing dis-satisfaction with the link, let me explain a few
> things in hopes of improving relations. If we can't do that, I'll sever the
> link and we'll part ways.
>
> BackupPC is an open-source project, and such projects generally welcome any
> and all comers to their community, as more people generally means more help,
> etc. If you don't know, BackupPC is visited by over 60,000 unique people
> every month and has well over a million page views per month, and I send a
> lot of traffic to http://backuppc.sourceforge.net every single day. One of
> the reasons for this is that the most frequently searched for phrase that
> takes people to BackupCentral is "free backup software."
>
> No, the gateway software (mail2forum.com) isn't perfect, but it is the best
> I've found out there. My biggest complaint is that it doesn't know how to
> put an "Re:" in front of a subject line so that it will thread properly in
> Outlook or similar client. (It actually can, but because it strips off the
> [BackupPC-Users] header only to have it put back on by the list, the "Re:"
> gets put after the [BackupPC-Users] string, not before it.)
>
> I took a look at the messages that went to the list from the forum for the
> past six months. The first thing I would like to say is that the vast
> majority of posts from Backup Central have been standard questions and
> answers. You don't notice those, though. I looked especially close at the
> ones that seemed to generate the most ire. It wasn't necessarily that they
> replied to messages without quoting any of the original message, although I
> encourage them not to do that. It was that the message they were replying
> to was so old that it wouldn't have been in most people's email clients
> anyway. In one case, a user was replying to his own post to say "Anyone?"
> and the original post was almost two months old. In another case, someone
> posted a "me too" post to a post that was two YEARS old! While this is
> perfectly normal behavior in a forum, it is NOT normal behavior in a mailing
> list. (Not that it's wrong; it just doesn't happen.)
>
> I have taken a lot of steps to minimize the impact of using a forum on a
> mailing list. I have put special code in and a human spam filter to stop at
> least that problem, and it's been 100% successful so far. I also make sure
> the subject line matches the original posts, although I can't fix the "Re:"
> problem. So while they don't thread perfectly, it's relatively obvious what
> they're replying to if you're using a standard email client. I also wrote
> some code that sends them a message about how the forums and emails are
> connected and how they should respond. Finally, I have now put a "READ
> BEFORE POSTING" sticky on the forum that shows up at the top.
>
> Some have requested a header up front. The software I'm using doesn't
> support that, but it does support a footer. If you're looking for a way to
> completely ignore posts from the list, then all you have to do is ignore
> messages from the email address "backuppc-forum AT backupcentral DOT com" as
> all forum messages come from that email address.
>
> I would urge you instead to take the VERY SMALL MINORITY of messages that
> fit into the "they replied wrong" category, and just hit the DELETE key,
> without replying to them with snide comments that suggest that they are an
> idiot simply for using Backup Central to interface to the list. Please
> understand that if a person is asking a question via the BackupCentral
> forum, they probably FOUND YOU via Backup Central. So the way some of you
> (and one of you in particular) respond to their very first post seems a
> rather rude way to welcome a new member of the community. In addition, I've
> never understood the logic of protesting one worthless email by replying to
> the list with a number of other worthless emails. Explain to me how that
> helps anyone.
>
> In closing, I offer the following. Please reply to this email or send me a
> private one to wcurtispreston AT gmail DOT com to tell me what you think.
> If you don't see what all the fuss is about, then please say so. If you'd
> like to tell me to go pound sand, then say so. I say this because I think
> the vast majority of you are fine with things the way they are. If I'm
> right, we'll leave things the way they are. If I'm wrong, I'll sever the
> link and you will lose all the people that come to your community via
> BackupCentral. I again don't see how that's going to help anyone either.
>
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------
> |This was sent by wcplists1 AT gmail DOT com via Backup Central.
> |Forward SPAM to abuse AT backupcentral DOT com.
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
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