From: Holger P. <wb...@pa...> - 2011-08-22 10:25:58
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Hi, Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote on 2011-08-22 00:34:02 -0400 [Re: [BackupPC-users] BackupPC on client machine running on Fedora13]: > > How many times do people need to be told this is a mailing list and > not a forum. I believe he hasn't been yet. And from the quality of the questions in this thread, you really wouldn't expect him to have read the sticky "PLEASE READ BEFORE POSTING" message, would you? ;-) > Craig: Is it possible to block mail originating from Backup Central > since it seems to just cause endless problems. Perhaps there could be > an auto-reply that asks the user to sign up on the mailing list... I'm not Craig, so you're not asking me, but still: yes, technically it would be possible to *unsubscribe* the forum, but I don't think that's the correct path of action (and not just because messages from it would pile up for moderation by Craig ;-). There has been "discussion" about this before, and Mr. Preston (who operates the forum) practically *offered* to separate the forum from the mailing list, if we all agreed that we didn't want this invaluable service to the good of mankind. He also indicated that there was *no chance* of fixing the obvious bugs that create the technically avoidable part of the annoyance (threading failures, editing posts). There was not much reaction on the list, and things stayed the way they were. If we want to reopen this discussion, we should do so in a separate thread, and we should be clear about what the question is. It's not, "are you *extremely* bothered by the forum gateway, or are you capable of ignoring what you don't want to read", it's quite simply, "do you think the mailing list should be accessible as a forum, yes or no?". And if so, there may be conditions such as "read-only", "require mandatory display of guidelines once per forum user before his first post" (the sticky message doesn't seem to be good enough), "technically sound implementation" (correct threading and removal of options that don't make sense, such as editing or deleting messages), etc. Whether the software used by Backup Central supports any of these options or not is quite beside the point. First of all, it's about what *we* are prepared to accept. We're the upstream mailing list. We have a reason for existing. If anyone wants to add value, then that's what they should do (and please note that "add" is *not* an abbreviation for "advertisement"). Regards, Holger |