Samba Forum vs. Mailing List?`!
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From: Linda W on 29 Jun 2010 18:30 Tom H. Lautenbacher wrote: > Hello everyone, > > > > I wanted to ask if there is an official Samba Forum, because I could not > find any on the Project Page. If there isn't any, is there a particular > reason for this not-existance? --- No need? Why do you need a forum with a mailing list? Forums are non-standard. Mailing lists have software to process them in many ways. Many are archived -- not something you get with forums. Forums seems to be a 'windows' thing for users when companies want to be able to ignore their user base. Emails cause the companies too much headache because the user's emails end up in employee inboxes and cause distractions from doing "real work", so they try to put users in forums, so they won't distract the companies' employees. -l -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba
From: Linda W on 29 Jun 2010 20:20 Tom H. Lautenbacher wrote: > > Uffff, well.. I am self employed and feel distracted and annoyed by all > those useless emails from all those mailing-lists that I have to attend, > too. ---- That's because you don't use the software and tools available to process email. Try procmail. Sort your email into mailboxes -- including your samba email. Then read that email box when you want to. Write a shell script or use mozilla to auto-expire unread email in those folders. You'll have all the features you might want in a forum. You can ignore everyone to your heart's content! :-) > My opinion is: > Every means of communication has it's functional range. --- nope -- forums can't deliver themselves to my email system automatically. They are proprietary solutions that don't fit any standard. > Mailing lists are existing since many years. They were perfect in those > pioneer years, when a small group of people worked together on a small > thing: Everyone needed to be informed about everything and everybody had to > discuss everything. Until today mailing lists serve such small development > groups very good. ---- They serve development groups fine today -- small and large... The linux kernel runs off of a mail list. There is no larger open source project than that. > But as projects grow bigger and the group of users with them, IMHO there > arises the need for further means of communication. --- Not forums. Tell me one thing you can do with forums that you can't do with email. > Speaking for me: I am a Samba user since about 2002, using Samba as > Administrator of some small-midsized Networks. I do not contribute code or > help developing. From time to time I am having a problem with implementing > Samba and need quick advice and help. > > For me now to get help, I needed to subscribe to this mailing list. From > this moment on I received approx. 20 emails which do not concern me or my > problem. ---- Because you don't use the tools that are available to you. I wrote my own perl script to process and sort my email in .. the early 90's -- using perl2 or perl3. I could throw it at you, but unless you've grown up with it, it wouldn't be that useful to you. Go get procmail. > I do not know the answer to all of those questions either, so I > can't help anybody. I am just annoyed and bothered by my mailbox getting > literally spammed. Since Samba is not the only open source community who's > mailing list I am attending, I am receiving daily approx. 30-40 of those > emails. ---- Not a problem -- you are not alone! I have well over 50 groups I' am subscribed to -- because I use the software -- like you -- I can't begin to read all of them. But I have all of them come into separate boxes where I have them auto-expire in a way that I keep the last few-several months depending on the group. Then I can read them at my leisure. My main inbox gets less than 5 emails a day. Overall I receive maybe 1000 emails a day (about 30-40% are spam that get filtered out by spamassassin -- ANOTHER tool you can't use in a forum!). > For my case a forum would server much better. I could go there, post my > question and subscribe to my thread, getting email-notification just about > my question. Furthermore I could quickly browse the forum to see, if there > are any open topics where I think that I could help someone else out. > Given that the forum settings are saving all postings for ever, the whole > forum would serve everybody as a very valuable knowledge base, making it > easy to find answers for common problems, without bugging anybody or > spamming everybody with the 10,000 versions of the same question. ---- If you want to see archives of the newsgroups, you can search them with google. Different groups have different archives, but most forums are not easily accessible with google -- you have to have logins and sign up and login...all sorts of messing stuff. If you put all the postings into a folder, -- use thunderbird or something that threads the conversations. You can browse by discussion, topic/subject, person...etc. Anything you could do in a forum, you can do in email. > So my final question: > If I would help making a Samba-Forum, would there be anybody here who would > appreciate and would like to use it? Would the "official" guys among you > want to implement it to the samba-homepage? --- Tell us one thing you can do in a forum that you can't do in email. Everything you want can be done in email with free tools! Seriously, procmail will let you filter all your email by group person, subject...etc. I'm sure there are others (I don't use procmail, but it's been around about as long as my perl script I use!). If you need more suggestions, check google for email filtering programs -- try spamassassin to weed out spam. I am NOT a member of the samba development team, so my opinion is my own. They may think otherwise, but I would be surprised. Cheers, Linda -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba
From: Tom H. Lautenbacher on 29 Jun 2010 20:20 Hi Linda! > > I wanted to ask if there is an official Samba Forum > No need? > Why do you need a forum with a mailing list? Because a forum IMHO has certain advantages over a mailing list. > Forums are non-standard. Mailing lists have software to process them > in many ways. Many are archived -- not something you get with forums. @Standard: Yes, I agree. This is a disadvantage for forums in comparison to other means of communication, such as mailing lists or usenet-news. @Software: What software is there and in which ways can you process mails? @Archive: Anybody running a forum can decide on his own, if he wants to archive things or not. > Forums seems to be a 'windows' thing for users when companies want to > be able to ignore their user base. > Emails cause the companies too much headache because the user's emails > end up in employee inboxes and cause distractions from doing "real > work", so they try to put users in forums, so they won't distract the > companies' > employees. Uffff, well.. I am self employed and feel distracted and annoyed by all those useless emails from all those mailing-lists that I have to attend, too. My opinion is: Every means of communication has it's functional range. Mailing lists are existing since many years. They were perfect in those pioneer years, when a small group of people worked together on a small thing: Everyone needed to be informed about everything and everybody had to discuss everything. Until today mailing lists serve such small development groups very good. But as projects grow bigger and the group of users with them, IMHO there arises the need for further means of communication. Speaking for me: I am a Samba user since about 2002, using Samba as Administrator of some small-midsized Networks. I do not contribute code or help developing. From time to time I am having a problem with implementing Samba and need quick advice and help. For me now to get help, I needed to subscribe to this mailing list. From this moment on I received approx. 20 emails which do not concern me or my problem. I do not know the answer to all of those questions either, so I can't help anybody. I am just annoyed and bothered by my mailbox getting literally spammed. Since Samba is not the only open source community who's mailing list I am attending, I am receiving daily approx. 30-40 of those emails. For my case a forum would server much better. I could go there, post my question and subscribe to my thread, getting email-notification just about my question. Furthermore I could quickly browse the forum to see, if there are any open topics where I think that I could help someone else out. Given that the forum settings are saving all postings for ever, the whole forum would serve everybody as a very valuable knowledge base, making it easy to find answers for common problems, without bugging anybody or spamming everybody with the 10,000 versions of the same question. Both means of communication can easily live in harmony! Developers or hard core members, who need to stay in touch very intensively and want to participate to ALL communication can continue participating at the mailing list (although it would be easily possible to just subscribe to an analogue topic in the forum and get automatically all messages, but anyway..). Another great plus of Forums is the possibility to use HTML and other "functionality". Well I know guys, all hardcore old-school guys among you roll their eyes, because you love plain text stuff. But the reality is that it does make sense and does bring communication again to a much higher level of productivity, when you are able e.g. to implement screenshots or diagrams to your answers, instead of having to e.g. draw a network diagram with ASCII art... Well there are many pros and cons to everything. Fact is, that I am having a problem with Samba to that I can't find any information, but instead get "spammed" with 30 emails that do not really concern me. Fact is that although Windows 7 is out for a long time now, I had to find all the information about the needed registry patches in some other forums or spread over some archived mailing-list fragments, hard to read and difficult to find. A decent userforum/knowledgebase would have served in a much more efficient way! So my final question: If I would help making a Samba-Forum, would there be anybody here who would appreciate and would like to use it? Would the "official" guys among you want to implement it to the samba-homepage? All the best Tom H. Lautenbacher -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba
From: Felix Miata on 29 Jun 2010 22:30 Forums almost without exception style themselves to annoy or even prevent use by any but those with the best vision, rarely, if ever, styling so that users by default get to see their preferred font size instead of having to jump through hoops to do it. Email from mailing lists, even when originally styled by the sender, usually has styling stripped, so that subscribers get plain text only, which renders legibly if not comfortably in the size the reader prefers. After more than a dozen years samping forums and subscribing to many mailing lists and newsgroups, I find those with the most to contribute gravitate to mailing lists, whereas forums tend to be dominated by unanswered and poorly answered questions. -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba
From: Helmut Hullen on 30 Jun 2010 01:30
Hallo, Tom, Du meintest am 30.06.10: >>> I wanted to ask if there is an official Samba Forum >> No need? >> Why do you need a forum with a mailing list? > Because a forum IMHO has certain advantages over a mailing list. But you should first try to use the possibilities of a mailing list - beginning with "reply to" when you answer to Linda's mail. It's no good behaviour starting a new thread instead. Viele Gruesse! Helmut -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba |