In reply to:

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?

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.

In reply to:

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.

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.

In reply to:

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.

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:

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

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