Just a few opinions regarding the responses (they're just opinions!......).
Most of the ideas lack the feature of having postings grouped by thread, but only those received in one 24 hour period. Filtering individual emails from the mailing list into a folder is a good idea. I'll try it. It would still take up more bandwidth than just a list of links. Having a link at the top to an html page with only links into the individual archive postings would be an awesome idea, especially if it could collect messages by thread, but only for that particular day. Then you don't have to waste time scanning through old postings. But this requires archiving yet another item, the daily list of links. The link to the archives is not bad, but I counted 5 mouse clicks and 2 scrollbar drags to get to a date-sorted list of postings, and then it is not a bite-sized list just for the day. It sounds like splitting hairs and any person should be able to put up with those things, but then the mailiing list starts to lose its distinction from a newsgroup. In fact, it would probably be easier to use if it was set up as a newsgroup. But a mailing list has the advantage of being more in-your-face, generating much more exchange of information about things that would otherwise be easy to not bother looking at. Every little convenience makes it more likely that a recipient reads/scans the issues of the day rather than just outright disregard them. I generally don't visit newsgroups unless I'm following a specific thread that I started, though I'll try to contribute to other threads on occassion (alot less likely than say for mailing lists). In contrast, since the mailing list already has the topics in a small manageable list, and only for the day, in my face, I take the time to peek at such-and-such a topic or comment on this-and-that. I learn stuff (mostly about how little I know) and hopefully give something back. So the smallest things seem to make all the difference in the "atmosphere" of the forum and the kind of exchange it generates. Yet another compromise (a variation of the idea of a link to an html digest above) is to have the entire digest in normal text, but just a small appended html part at the end consisting of a threaded list of the day's postings , each item linking to its individual entry in the archive. This shouldn't take much bandwidth, and can be easily ignored by those who hate html. It also avoids the need to maintain an html digest for each day at some central site, just so people can warp to it. Fred -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred Ma Department of Electronics Carleton University, Mackenzie Building 1125 Colonel By Drive Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1S 5B6 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ========================================================================== --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the line: 'unsubscribe vnc-list' in the message BODY See also: http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/intouch.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------
