Subject: RE: list suggestions

From: Ben Luna <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 1997 17:08:09 -0700

On Wednesday, July 16, 1997 4:39 PM, Shawn Boyce
[SMTP:[email-masked]] wrote:
> I would also prefer a newsgroup.

I think that a newsgroup is a good idea, but sometimes you just can't
beat a good mailing list.  You get a lot more FAQ questions with
newsgroups because people skip a lot of the messages.  With a mailing
list you get all of the messages, and if you have an archive of the
messages like this list does you can easily search through em.  You also
get a form of "community" with a mailing list that you don't always get
with newsgroups.  Newgroups are great for the casual passersby though
and as such are quite useful.

We had a pretty good compromise to this with our dimension x
lists/newsgroups.  We had a mailing list with an analogous newsgroup,
which we mirrored all posts between the two.  Additionally, we kept an
archive of all of the messages on the news server so if someone posted a
good example of something, it was kept on-line and accessable for good.
People could go back to old messages and look around for anything that
might be of interest.  Tieing this together with a simple cgi search
engine, and you have a www accessible database of all past traffic that
is easy to get to.

For the sychronization between news and mail we used some publicly
available code to convert from mail to news and vice versa.  All this
was run on a unix machine with free software.

Implementing this solution may prove infeasible given that UW is nice
enough to host this list for us as it is,  and that they might not have
the resources or time to support because setup would take some work.  I
just thought I would bring it up.

Ben

---

From: [email-masked] (Tom Horsley)
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 97 11:19:55 -0400

>A newsgroup that was gatewayed one way, i.e. list posting would appear
>on it but new list postings couldn't be made from it, would be OK.
>Other than that I loudly second the comments about S/N on newsgroups.

Better yet, a pgpmoose moderated newsgroup gatewayed one way from the
mailing list. Then not only wouldn't spam leak into the list from the group,
but it couldn't get posted (or stay posted, anyway) to the group either...

For all the poop on this, read:

   http://people.qualcomm.com/ggr/pgpmoose.html

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