Re: [Springframework-developer] Mail list moved? - forum to mailing list

[Colin S. <col...@ex...>]

On 1/11/2006 10:08 AM, Alexandru Popescu wrote:
> #: Alin Simionoiu changed the world a bit at a time by saying on  
> 1/11/2006 4:43 PM :#
>> Is the any way that the forum can be setup to send emails to this  
>> mailing list or maybe different ones based on forum category?.
>>
>> I personally prefer mailing lists, is much easier to follow what's  
>> going on. Most of the modern email clients will display an popup  
>> window every-time you get an email, so I will know that somebody 
>> made  a post.
>>
>> What I like the most though is that I can read the posts offline but  
>> that's just me.
> No, it's not just you. I am pushing for the feature for more than an 
> year, but till now with no results. Afaik the current forum toolkit is 
> able to send messages to mailing lists, so I guess we should try to 
> push this once again.
>
> As to clarify: imo I wouldn't need even to post from mailing list; 
> just to see the forum posted messages. If I want to answer I can go 
> there.
>
> thanks in advance for reconsidering this,
Alex,

We're trying to do what we can (and please hold off on the conspiracy 
theories as your subsequent message would seem to imply). It's just not 
as simple as just pushing a switch, or buying new software. We can't 
just throw away 30,000+ old posts in the forums. It's a gold mine of 
information.

We used to run phpBB, which all in all was not a great piece of forum 
software for a number of reasons, just one of them being lack of mail or 
NNTP integration.

So in Sept. 2005, we attempted to move to Jive Forums, which would have 
given us excellent forums, and also excellent mailing list and NNTP 
integration, but we couldn't convert the existing message base (nor 
really even the user base) properly. Throwing away old messages was 
simply not an option.

So we switched to vBulletin instead, which at least is more secure than 
phpBB, has a _much_ better management story, seems to scale better, has 
better forum functionality in pretty well every respect, can at least 
send email digests of individual forums (if not full mail integration), 
and was able to convert all old posts and the user properly. The one 
issue in conversion was that old internal links remained in old format, 
and still don't work. That particular issue, we're paying a student to 
manually fix up.

At this point I'm waiting for either this NNTP plugin for vBulletin
   http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=92588&page=1&pp=15
to actually put out a non-alpha released for vBulletin 3.5, or vBulletin 
itself to add NNTP (and/or full mail) integration. I presume the former 
will happen before the latter, since vBulletin 3.5 only came out in Sept.

Colin