[Digikam-users] [Digikam-devel] List moderation

[Johnny]

Marie-Noëlle Augendre <mnaugendre at gmail.com> writes:

> 2011/11/11 Martin (KDE) <kde at fahrendorf.de>
>
>     > The key words are "the only threads or forums you're interested in".
>     > With a mailing-list, I receive everything in my mailbox, and I don't
>     > want 90% of them.
>
>     I see this as an advantage. I don't read every mail but in many of them
>     I take a short look and sometimes it is interesting an I continue to
>     read. With this I get new information or a point where I can help
>     others. This leads to sometimes very informative and knowledgeable
>     discussions.
>    
>     Martin
>
> I understand your point.
> But I'm interested in too many different things to be able to scan even quickly
> everything that comes in.
>
> As communities grow, they generate more and more traffic and that makes it
> difficult for everybody to read/follow everything.
>
> My feeling is that mailing-list are well suited to not too big groups,
> exchanging information related to the "current and now" (I'm not sure I explain
> this accurately, but english is not my native language). As the community
> grows, with people having different interests, and wanting to search/read/
> comment past answers and discussions, and having access to the common
> knowledge, I think the advantages of a forum become proeminent.

Maybe you should consider using filters and/or scoring in your workflow
if you are not already using it? Depending on how your mail client
works, the workflow would be different. My choice of "information
management client" is Gnus and I use this for all my mailing needs
(personal, mailing lists, several mail addresses) as well as RSS
reader. For mailing lists, I have set up a filter for each list which
separates the messages on a list basis - clearly, if one wants to one
could set filters on contents of the list (e.g. you could set a filter
to remove or include certain topics by filtering on headlines or any
other metadata (it may be possible to filter on body content, but I
never found a need for that). This is really what I do with mailing
lists, but it could be made much more advanced and flexible if you need.

For RSS, which is handled identically to mail in Gnus (from a user
perspective at least), I use a more "complex" setup. I have around 10
feeds relating to a topic area of choice, so I group all these in a
virtual group so it looks like only one. As I have various interest for
different subtopics, I have set up scoring rules on keywords that scores
up messages I am interested in to appear on top. E.g. you could set
"lightbox +100", "colour +10", "rating +40", "spammer at spam.net -1000" to
get messages relating to lightbox, rating and colour on top and messages
from spammer on bottom (and could be set to be automatically deleted if
you wish).

This is just an example of my usage needs, but once you got your
configuration set up, it is /very/ easy to follow hundreds if not
thousands of weekly messages by filtering away the uninteresting ones
before even being seen. You will only scan the ones being interesting as
defined by the rules. Actually, the only limit to what you can follow is
how restrictive you are - clearly, you need to know what you are
interested in for this to be effective, but this is the same for a forum.


>
> Also people ask technical questions and request for help on the FB Digikam page
> too, as if it were a forum. But unlike a forum, the answers are not historized
> and organized properly, thus they are lost for future users.
>

This is sort of a point I think. Mailing lists can normally be searched
though via e.g. Gmane (or Google) if you know what you're looking
for. In theory, forums should be better at categorising, but I find in
practise it is too unwieldly to use and I still have to search for what
I need (as could be done through Gmane or google for mailing lists).

The best I guess is to have a wiki where dedicated users (e.g. yourself
and Rinus :)) extract key information (e.g. emacs wiki) originating on
the lists.

Only my 2.

-- 
Johnny