scattering of content - what's the deal with otterhub
It seems like a lot of the developer discussions seems to be split between this list and this forum on otterhub. Is there some particularly good reason for that? It's a real PITA to have to check both locations, and I *vastly* prefer this list format (WWW-based forums are a total time-sink). Just curious to see if I'm the only one to think that.
David Boyes wrote:
It seems like a lot of the developer discussions seems to be split between this list and this forum on otterhub. Is there some particularly good reason for that? It’s a real PITA to have to check both locations, and I **vastly** prefer this list format (WWW-based forums are a total time-sink). [...]
Hi David, some users prefer forums and some mailing lists. Both groups are too big to ignore and both have good reasons for their decision, so one should not simply close any of the two platforms. What's missing is a technical solution where you can interact with a forum via a mailing list so that every user can use what he likes best. But we have not found a really suitable software application. We're interested in any practicable suggestion to solve this scattering. Alexander Public Relations OTRS Community Board / OtterHub (http://www.otterhub.org/)
some users prefer forums and some mailing lists. Both groups are too big to ignore and both have good reasons for their decision, so one should not simply close any of the two platforms.
OK. I thought that might be the case, but good to confirm.
What's missing is a technical solution where you can interact with a forum via a mailing list so that every user can use what he likes best. But we have not found a really suitable software application. We're interested in any practicable suggestion to solve this scattering.
Use a private NNTP server to store the conversation articles, and one of the WWW-based news reader/post tools to provide the forum version; use mail2news to link the mailing list to the NNTP environment. Easy to manage, known to work at scale, uses standard components (no development required, just configuration), does not mandate special software at the client side. Shouldn't take you more than a day or two to set up.
David Boyes wrote: [...]
Use a private NNTP server to store the conversation articles, and one of the WWW-based news reader/post tools to provide the forum version; use mail2news to link the mailing list to the NNTP environment.
Easy to manage, known to work at scale, uses standard components (no development required, just configuration), does not mandate special software at the client side. Shouldn't take you more than a day or two to set up.
I have no experience with this. Could you please suggest a concrete set of applications for this solution or a how-to? I will then try to look at this. Thanks in advance Alexander
I have no experience with this. Could you please suggest a concrete set of applications for this solution or a how-to? I will then try to look at this.
INN is the most common NNTP server. http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/inn.html for more information about INN. Mail2news is part of the INN package. Instructions for setting up mail2news are in the INN package. One WWW-based NNTP client is http://web-news.sourceforge.net/. There are lots more; I pulled this one at random. Basically, what you want to do is use the software originally designed for Usenet news, and create a two-way gateway from a newsgroup to a mailing list. The users that like "pull" content (forum users) interact with the newsgroup via a NNTP client, the rest of us use the mailing list via email. Both sets of users see the same content. Note that the use of the "Usenet news software" does NOT imply implementing a full news server. You don't have to feed or accept feeds from other people; in fact, you probably want to lock down the NNTP server to the IP addresses of the WWW-based client machine to avoid Google, etc from skimming out your content.
participants (2)
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Alexander Halle -
David Boyes