Mailman 3.0 to modernize mailing lists
lwn.net
lwn.net
Post voting is bad for fact oriented discussions, popularity is a poor indicator for the value of a post. The user interface is cramped, and hides too much of valuable information I would expect to see instantly. Also, the looks are from previous decade (looks like sf.net clone to me) and not very aesthetic.
Sure, this might be a step forward nevertheless, but it is a really small one.
One of the goals of mailman is that the same software should be able to handle either a mailing list or a forum, so that people who want the UI of a forum can collaborate with people who want to live in mutt.
We've been waiting for this to replace our ancient ecartis manager (https://launchpad.net/ecartis). While the UI doesn't look extremely pretty, compared to ecartis it will be like moving from 1999 to 2008 or so.
https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
It really is a web interface to mailing lists and NNTP (NNTP!!). And it's damn fast. Flies like the wind:
So, it's unfortunate, but it's nothing new.
It is stored in unicode because that's what passlib hash algorithms return, not because there's an underlying plaintext representation.
Encrypting them indicates there's a way to decrypt them. Hashing, by definition, is not possible (not practical, really).
"To answer the question that at least a few dozen of you are looking for: Mailman 3 will not, by default, send you a monthly reminder that includes your password in plain text. In fact, it can't; Mailman 3 hashes passwords before storing them."
This new version doesn't alter the reality that very few website owners want mailing lists, anymore. But, it makes me want to start some new mailing lists (I don't currently maintain any Mailman mailing lists, though in the past I was wrangling dozens of them).
The UI looks great, and the new architectural changes sound great, too. It's long overdue, though.
It's true that Mailman was rock solid. But it had a number of features that made it difficult for users and administrators alike.
In particular, users who were not computer savvy complained bitterly that they couldn't easily search through the archives, couldn't understand how to subscribe and unsubscribe themselves, and that the archives (in their repeated messages to the moderators) didn't look like the mailing lists on Google and Yahoo.
In other words, it wasn't sufficient to have solid software. Mailman needed a modern UI. It took some time, but that moment seems to have come. It's a bit too late for me; for a variety of reasons (many having nothing to do with Mailman), I recently moved my mailing list to Google Groups.
I'm very happy to see this new set of functionality aimed at making Mailman relevant for a new generation of users. Kudos to the maintainers for sticking with the project, and for providing a valuable service that shouldn't need to be outsourced to third parties. And for not only pushing forward with the internals, but also on the UI. It looks quite snazzy and impressive, and should help to keep Mailman relevant for many more years.
IMHO, this is a feature, and an important one, not something bad.
I'm surprised about the problems they had with (un)subscribing -- the web ui has always been a controversial part of Mailman, but intended for those that think the email UI is too hard to use. FWIW I actually think it's much easier to manage subscriptions to Mailman (via the web UI) than to manage them on Google Groups.
As for search and archive -- yeah, those have been in need of a facelift for a long, long time. I've been toying with doing something about them myself, but have hold off, waiting to see what Mailman 3 would ship with.
I would rather recommend http://discourse.org for anyone who finding mailing list + nice web and mobile interface.
(because there really are lot of mailing lists where the desire of the core users to stick with their own mail setup is understandable but at odds with making it easy to capture more casual contributions)
I am not trying to criticize mailing lists, they definitely have a lot of advantages over some of the newer systems that have grown to replace them. Without organic growth from new developers though, mailing lists are doomed to become a relic of a distant time. To most developers, they already are.
* Since data is now in SQL, it's easier to interact with the DB and have simple tools delete spammers. * Since there's an exposable API now, it's possible to develop systems that interact with mailman and help with the issue.
For those of you who don't use mailing lists, what do you use instead for these discussions?
I used to be subscribed to a number of mailing lists maybe a decade ago, but none now. The signal:noise ratio is generally pretty terrible for anyone pressed for time.
I agree with Jeff Atwood: forum software is generally pretty terrible. The difference being that I don't find his better - the way it actively prevents people from reading offline is enough to make me extremely frustrated.
To me a mailing list serve a purpose. Its a middle ground between IRC and not having any discussion medium at all.
IRC is suitable for chat but discussions happen on mailing lists (or here on Hackernews).
In mailing lists conversations are threaded and there's nothing wrong with carefully considering your response before the question flies off the screen as on an IRC chat. Stackoverflow is great for one-off questions, but they are not a support forum for your project.
IMO new or young projects don't yet have a need for real discussion around the project, the project is to small, the Dev team is too small and or is located geographically close together, or the project just doesn't warrant in depth discussion yet.
Edit: my biggest gripe about mailing lists is that many do not meet the one - click - unsubscribe standard, most that I've seen require two clicks. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but it does matter to me.
The new interface looks pretty convenient.
And what on earth does 'organic growth' of mailing lists even mean in this context?
Had you been commenting about mailman specifically, then I guess I could see your point (it's one product in this space) -- generalising to all mailing lists ever seems absurd.
"The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider accepting the trial offer on the right. Thank you for visiting LWN.net!"
It's possible (this was posted on HN 5 hours ago) that text was added retrospectively, but working on the basis that it's boilerplate text then LWN seems to figure some subscriber links will be shared AND that's OK because it's an opportunity to promote subscription to others.
Here's the LWN editor commenting on it, and their own posting history: