[Samba] Samba Forum vs. Mailing List?`!

[Linda W]

Tom H. Lautenbacher wrote:
>
> Uffff, well.. I am self employed and feel distracted and annoyed by all
> those useless emails from all those mailing-lists that I have to attend,
> too.
----
	That's because you don't use the software and tools available
to process email.

	Try procmail.

	Sort your email into mailboxes -- including your samba
email.

	Then read that email box when you want to.  
Write a shell script or use mozilla to auto-expire unread email in those
folders.

	You'll have all the features you might want in a forum.
You can ignore everyone to your heart's content! :-)


 
> My opinion is:
> Every means of communication has it's functional range.
---
	nope -- forums can't deliver themselves to my email system
automatically.  They are proprietary solutions that don't fit any
standard.  




> Mailing lists are existing since many years. They were perfect in those
> pioneer years, when a small group of people worked together on a small
> thing: Everyone needed to be informed about everything and everybody had to
> discuss everything. Until today mailing lists serve such small development
> groups very good.
----
	They serve development groups fine today -- small and large...
The linux kernel runs off of a mail list.  There is no larger open source
project than that.



> But as projects grow bigger and the group of users with them, IMHO there
> arises the need for further means of communication.
---
	Not forums.  Tell me one thing you can do with forums that you
can't do with email.




> Speaking for me: I am a Samba user since about 2002, using Samba as
> Administrator of some small-midsized Networks. I do not contribute code or
> help developing. From time to time I am having a problem with implementing
> Samba and need quick advice and help.
> 
> For me now to get help, I needed to subscribe to this mailing list. From
> this moment on I received approx. 20 emails which do not concern me or my
> problem.
----
	Because you don't use the tools that are available to you.

	I wrote my own perl script to process and sort my email in .. the
early 90's -- using perl2 or perl3.  I could throw it at you, but unless
you've grown up with it, it wouldn't be that useful to you.  Go get 
procmail.


> I do not know the answer to all of those questions either, so I
> can't help anybody. I am just annoyed and bothered by my mailbox getting
> literally spammed. Since Samba is not the only open source community who's
> mailing list I am attending, I am receiving daily approx. 30-40 of those
> emails.
----
	Not a problem -- you are not alone!  I have well over 50 groups I'
am subscribed to -- because I use the software -- like you -- I can't begin
to read all of them.  But I have all of them come into separate boxes where
I have them auto-expire in a way that I keep the last few-several months 
depending on the group.  Then I can read them at my leisure.  My main inbox
gets less than 5 emails a day.  Overall I receive maybe 1000 emails a day
(about 30-40% are spam that get filtered out by spamassassin -- ANOTHER 
tool you can't use in a forum!).




> For my case a forum would server much better. I could go there, post my
> question and subscribe to my thread, getting email-notification just about
> my question. Furthermore I could quickly browse the forum to see, if there
> are any open topics where I think that I could help someone else out.
> Given that the forum settings are saving all postings for ever, the whole
> forum would serve everybody as a very valuable knowledge base, making it
> easy to find answers for common problems, without bugging anybody or
> spamming everybody with the 10,000 versions of the same question.
----
	If you want to see archives of the newsgroups, you can search them
with google.  Different groups have different archives, but most forums
are not easily accessible with google -- you have to have logins and sign
up and login...all sorts of messing stuff.

	If you put all the postings into a folder, -- use thunderbird
or something that threads the conversations.  You can browse by discussion,
topic/subject, person...etc.  Anything you could do in a forum, you can
do in email.



> So my final question:
> If I would help making a Samba-Forum, would there be anybody here who would
> appreciate and would like to use it? Would the "official" guys among you
> want to implement it to the samba-homepage?
---
	Tell us one thing you can do in a forum that you can't do in email.

	Everything you want can be done in email with free tools!

	Seriously, procmail will let you filter all your email by group
person, subject...etc.  I'm sure there are others (I don't use procmail,
but it's been around about as long as my perl script I use!).

	If you need more suggestions, check google for 
email filtering programs -- try spamassassin to weed out spam.

	I am NOT a member of the samba development team, so my opinion
is my own.  They may think otherwise, but I would be surprised.

Cheers,
Linda