In reply to:

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Does the fact that some people do not like using the BBS interface for one
or several of the reasons I've listed before
(http://empeg.merlins.org/archives//empeg-general/2000-May/001443.html)
somehow bother you?

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Not at all. You're entitled to "not like the interface". You're NOT entitled to scrape the data available through that interface without explicit permission. Something to keep in mind... I gave you notice, other people might not. They might simply claim you are infringing upon the copyright of their written work. They'd be right. Its something you should think about.

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This is utter bull and you know it. The other list is dead, and we both know that it's not because everyone who reads this BBS does it by choice, it's just the only place where posts happen.

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I think that's called "voting with your feet"... if the overwhelming majority wanted a mailing list, the onelist.com mailing list would be thriving with the same glory that this web forum is. Instead the mailing list came too late, trying to supplant/supplement an already existing web-forum.

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This is not a flame, but even the empeg folks do not post anything outside of the BBS, so if you're not on it, you don't know what's happening.

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They're not even required to post here. They do it because they enjoy doing it, not because its a business necessity.

If you're concerned with the way the list is functioning, start a new mailing list and campaign the Empeg folks to subscribe and post to it as well. I'm not against there being a mailing list, I'm against you scraping the content from one source to fill yours.

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Have you read those digests? Have you followed threads on them? They're a complete disaster...
I also find it interesting that you're cool with people reading the digest,
but not the digest when it's been massaged a bit and split into individual
messages.

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Yes, I have read the digests. If you want to follow threads in thread-format, use the web page. The digests are to SUMMARIZE the day's data. And there's no disparity between my two positions. What I'm against is someone copying the data and re-using it without permission.

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I'm not going to make the point that the BBS divided the mailing list that existed, and caused its death, but you get the idea.

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Good, because I think the web forum came first... Ah yes, it did. (checking the archives) ... first post in the web group, 5/19/99, first post in the empeg archives 8/24/99....

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Are you pissed at me because one could occasionally not want to spend the time to log into the BBS, find the message and answer there?

Am I responsible if you use a message exchange forum that is uninviting to some and that they can decide that they won't bother to participate as a
result?

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I'm pissed that, when the wave of MkII owners comes up, there will be great confusion between users who have trouble distinguishing between the web forum, the wwwthreads digests, and your scraped-mailing-list. Your actions will cause confusion among newer (less savvy) Empeg owners in the future, and that annoys me greatly.

In reply to:

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If someone could be rightfully angry, that's the mailing list users for
having had all the discussions move to a place hard to access.

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Obviously there's a good chunk of the community who LIKES the web forums, because we're the ones who collected the money to upgrade the software. There's absolutely no reason the mailing lists have become lower-traffic EXCEPT that people were already here and this was already a thriving community. I'm sure if there was enough traffic on the mailing lists to warrant it, then someone from Empeg would monitor it and be sure to post on it accordingly (in much the same un-official manner they do on here). Empeg is going to go wherever its customers are, Marc, you're not giving them nearly enough credit.

In reply to:

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Yet, I'm not
angry. I respect your choice, I deal with it the best I can (i.e. gateway)
and I leave you in piece.

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Good. I'm glad you don't take it personal or anything. We've known each other long enough that I hoped you would just see it as a philosophical disagreement and not as something personal.

D

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On the one hand, you're telling me that you think that the existence of Marc's service is confusing, and on the other hand you're proposing creating a second, separate community?

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The difference is that my scenario is two separate communities, instead of one community and one group that LOOKS like a community but is remarkably sheltered from the world.

There is room for competing communities -- happens all the time. The confusion issue comes from the fact that Marc's interface LOOKS like a community but isn't.

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But the digests are one-way-only. Better get yourself excluded from that too. After all, I could reimplement Marc's code on my mail machine, invoked by procmail, and get the same effect. I haven't because I consider reinventing wheels to be brain-dead and broken, but if Marc ends up filtering other contributors, I'll have to look at it.

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The digests are part of the BBS, they're generated by the BBS and using the BBS is implied consent to allow it to be used in that way. I haven't given MARC, (or anyone else) permission to forward the messages, though.

The BBS digests are very clearly "one-way", no confusion whatsoever. They come up, it says it's a summary of the day's posts, and that's it. Nothing more.

The issue is, has been, and will be, the CONFUSION factor of Marc's list, not the mere presence of the content.

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While you're at it, get them to add a real, bi-directional email interface so we can all be happy. Digests are inherently unreadable because they aren't threaded. I don't object terribly to having to go back to the website to post a reply, but if I could only read online or a digest, I probably wouldn't read. Indeed, I really didn't read the digests until Marc built the burster...and I was running 8a for a long time.

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The problem with that (and the reason Marc hasn't gone into the effort to create a back-path into the BBS) is that it isn't NEARLY that simple. Many MUA's don't return proper threading info (what message they're in-reply-to, etc.) so where do you stick the reply? What do you do if the user doesn't have an account on the BBS? Do you just silently drop the message? What if the user has an account but isn't permitted to post to that forum? (a la annoucements)

There are a lot of issues involved in that, many of which are outside the control of the script-writer, hence that's not a feature I'd expect any time soon.

In reply to:

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So you'll try to force a split between those who prefer email to those who don't.

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No. If Marc wants to solve all the above problems and create a single community, I'd withdraw my objection in a heartbeat. I would rather have two separate communities than a single community with a portion of the population wounded and/or confused, yes. Wounded/confused community members is a Very Bad Thing.

If Marc really wanted to "unite the communities", he would have started work on figuring out how to post messages BACK to the BBS.

I'll even throw out the olive branch and set up a copy of wwwthreads (this version) on my system for Marc to play with in attempting to set up the gateway, so he can tinker with it and experiment on "live data" without affecting the Empeg BBS.

Again, to reiterate -- I don't have a problem with a mailing list, but with the resulting confusion the current implementation can cause.

D

In reply to:

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The difference is that my scenario is two separate communities, instead of one community and one group that LOOKS like a community but is remarkably sheltered from the world.

There is room for competing communities -- happens all the time. The confusion issue comes from the fact that Marc's interface LOOKS like a community but isn't.

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and

In reply to:

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The issue is, has been, and will be, the CONFUSION factor of Marc's list, not the mere presence of the content.

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OK, I really don't understand where you're coming from; Marc's list is in no way confusing to me, and I don't think there's anyone else who has been confused or misled by it. Nonetheless, lets try to fix this problem. If WWWThreads starts supporting a real, two-way mail interface, I think they'll have a great product on their hands.

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The problem with that (and the reason Marc hasn't gone into the effort to create a back-path into the BBS) is that it isn't NEARLY that simple. Many MUA's don't return proper threading info (what message they're in-reply-to, etc.) so where do you stick the reply?

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Understand that I've thought about this for a total of about three minutes, but it really doesn't strike me as rocket science. You've made the feature request that the digest include the URL of the original post. It could just as easily have a mailto: URL, either in addition or instead of the http: URL, that sends back a message to the board (or the gateway if it's separate, more on that later).

Where to put the message? Depending on the behavior of the MTA on the Gateway/Board machine, you can do it one of two ways. You need to encode the post ID number in the message, and this could be either in the Reply-To: field (or From: if you want to deal with really broken MUA's) or the Subject line. If you use Reply-To:, then you get the message sent back to something like [email protected], and the gateway posts that message in reply to message 54321. This depends on the MTA delivering everything addressed to *@empeg.comms.net to the gateway. If the MTA can't/won't/doesn't do that, you could encode the same thing in the subject line (and strip it off before posting to the board) and send everything to [email protected]. You could even put the post ID in the body of the message, but this is subject to being clobbered by dumb MUA's (and dumb MU's ).

If you're able to use Reply-To: and/or From:, simply hitting reply in the MUA will work. Subject: will as well if you encode the post ID in the outbound messages' subject line. Broken MUAs will probably have to use the mailto: URLs. (remember that most things support ?subject= syntax in the mailto: if you go that route.)

In reply to:

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What do you do if the user doesn't have an account on the BBS? Do you just silently drop the message? What if the user has an account but isn't permitted to post to that forum? (a la annoucements)

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The same thing that any functional MTA does with every other email message that doesn't make it to its intended destination. Bounce it with some informative error message. The one gotcha related to user accounts is that the only authentication is the From: header...That could use some additional thought.

In reply to:

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There are a lot of issues involved in that, many of which are outside the control of the script-writer, hence that's not a feature I'd expect any time soon.

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Actually, this is far better dealt with by the script than by an external gateway like Marc is building. If Marc is bursting digests rather than scraping the web, then he doesn't have any HTTP code at all right now. For this functionality to happen outside the script, you need to spoof forms, etc. Lots of stuff that can break with even slight changes in future versions of the script. If this is done within the script, it's much easier.

Email me if you'd like to continue this discussion further: n6mod at milewski dot org

-Zandr
Mk.I #150
Mk.II #39

In reply to:

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OK, I really don't understand where you're coming from; Marc's list is in no way confusing to me, and I don't think there's anyone else who has been confused or misled by it. Nonetheless, lets try to fix this problem. If WWWThreads starts supporting a real, two-way mail interface, I think they'll have a great product on their hands.

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The issue isn't "Is it confusing the few tech-savvy people who are using it today?" it is "Will it confuse the non-savvy people who are just general Empeg consumers a few months from now when Empeg's hit the street on a wider basis?"

On the topic of replying back to the board.... there are LOTS of issues:

1.) user authentication
2.) threading
3.) post authorization (a different entity altogether from authentication)

Further, putting this into the wwwthreads program as opposed to having an independent gateway deal with it requires that -- to install it -- you need to have all sorts of greater access to the box than currently required. (right now all that is needed is cgi-bin access... playing games with dynamic e-mail addresses requires access to the configuration files sendmail/qmail/MTA-of-choice uses. Since MANY wwwthreads users install the software at "joe's random web hosting" company, that's going to be really ugly.

If marc wanted a functional mailing list, he'd have either (a) written it himself, scratching the itch as ESR would put it, or (b) contacted the wwwthreads author about "doing it right" ... instead he put a half-cooked recipe out there which is just a brain-dead non-solution and tries to convince the rest of the world that everyone should help HIM. If he was interested in "communities" he would have solved the two-way problem or made a greater effort (any? effort) to convince the software author to solve it. I find no evidence that Marc has tried to solve the problem at all, really.

D

In reply to:

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The issue isn't "Is it confusing the few tech-savvy people who are using it today?" it is "Will it confuse the non-savvy people who are just general Empeg consumers a few months from now when Empeg's hit the street on a wider basis?"

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As a general rule, the non-savvy consumers don't find web interfaces objectionable. It's those of us who are savvy enough to write filters for our email that really prefer having discussions in mail folders instead of web pages. I still think you're tilting at windmills here.

In reply to:

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If marc wanted a functional mailing list,

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He doesn't. I don't. Mailing lists we can do, and that wheel's been invented rather nicely a few times. No, he, like me, wants to be able to read this discussion in a far more user-friendly way than the web interface presents.

In reply to:

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... instead he put a half-cooked
recipe out there which is just a brain-dead non-solution and tries to convince the rest of the world that everyone should help HIM.

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Sigh. This has obviously trancended reason with you.

I give you credit though. In the 10+ years I've been on the 'Net, this is the first time anyone has added themselves to my kill file.

Now then, on to solutions:

In reply to:

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1.) user authentication

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Any suggestions? This is the only sticky one to me.

In reply to:

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2.) threading

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Why is this difficult? My last post explained several ways to do it.

In reply to:

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3.) post authorization (a different entity altogether from authentication)

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Again, you'll have to explain. I don't understand why this isn't already solved if you solve authentication. If you get a message (authenticated somehow) you then look to see if that user can post. If not, then send back a bounce. The logic to authorize posts is already there, we're just accepting input from a different source.

In reply to:

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playing games with dynamic e-mail addresses requires access to the configuration files sendmail/qmail/MTA-of-choice uses.

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You didn't actually read what I wrote, did you?

This depends on the MTA delivering everything address to *@empeg.comms.net to the gateway.

This is a single configuration entry, and the norm for "joe's random web hosting". All mail to your domain goes to one mbox. Make that mbox the script, and you're done. All I'm doing is reading the To: line for input. And I suggested a way to use the subject line for that instead.


-Zandr
Mk.I #150
Mk.II #39