Don't forget those of us who dislike web-forum software and prefer to interact with the group via email: I very seldom use the GG site itself. I find threaded email is a *very* good way of following discussions. I can have a "I didn't know that" moment delivered to my inbox every day, without having to visit a website and contend with the interface of yet-another-web-forum.
On Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:22:04 -0700 (PDT) offwhite <offwh...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I think John made some very good points in that blog post. > > I am running a Google Group and I am finding for smaller groups it is > possible to give a few people moderator rights so that any new members > are able to get their posts in at a reasonable time. Still, the points > that John raises are valid. I don't think spam control is any more difficult on mailing lists than it is in general, it just seems that GG in particular sucks at it. GG's problems aren't a condemnation of mailing lists in general, just GG's implementation in particular. I subscribe to many other MLs not on GG and they have zero spam problems. Also, the user experience is "meh" at best, and the GG search is surprisingly and ironically crappy. You get better results by picking markmail or nabble results out of a google web search than by trying to search google groups directly. > > I suggested that he do the following. > > 1) Shut down posting from non-admins for the group ( limit to > announcements and summaries ) > 2) Direct people to ask questions on StackOverflow.com (SO) and tag > the questions appropriately (jQuery in John's case, Clojure for this > group) > 3) Aggregate all new questions on SO regularly (every 4 hours?) to > create a summary post on this group > > A group is useful because it gives you a central place to keep > everyone up to date by sending out announcements. Since spam can get > through when they are mixing in with a large number of members who > have rights to post messages it seems Google Groups has a problem with > preventing spam. So this hybrid approach may be the best option for > now. I have found that SO is a great solution for getting quick > answers which tend to be good quality answers. Their who system for > rating answers and awarding community points has been working very > well. There is no such thing for Google Groups. > SO (by design) forces the interaction into a "question and answer" format, so is ill-suited for general discussion, which is part of the reason I enjoy following mailing lists like this one. The pontificating is equally if not more interesting than the question-and-answer threads on here, particularly with as high caliber as the community around Clojure seems to be. I really like SO precisely because it sidesteps a lot of problems with traditional web fora, but attempting to use it to *replace* a mailing list is, I think, ill-advised. > On the flip side, there is no way to indicate group membership with > Clojure or jQuery on SO that I know about. Being able to send out an > announcement to a group that is "following" a tag could be a way to > eliminate a need for Google Groups altogether. I do not know if this > is on the SO feature list. > Would definitely be nice, I would end up on SO a lot more often if it had email-enabled "nosy" lists. > Brennan > -Kyle --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
