[SAC] Mailing List Administration

[Frank Warmerdam]

Tyler Mitchell wrote:
> I'm not familiar with all the problems or headaches with these kinds of 
> search options, so I can't comment on them technically - but I'll at 
> least through out a few opinions...
> 
> I personally don't like the idea of outsourcing a critical tool to a 
> closed system or commercial service unless necessary.  Are we really 
> wanting to use a tool that puts unmanaged advertisements on 'our' content?

Tyler,

This is a fair question.

> Do they provide good support and have any sort of guarantees around 
> availability into the future?  Just curious if we'll get left without 
> any options and have to build our own eventually anyway.

I don't really see this is a big issue.  We will continue to maintain
our own archives, and can always build search mechanisms based on them
in the future if we want.

> Wouldn't it also be good to maintain/drive traffic back to our sites so 
> we can get more of a glimpse of who our users are?

We haven't been doing any serious reviews of our web logs, nor have we
been taking advantage of even a fraction of what we could be doing by
other means (such as user enabled accounts for the drupal site), so I
don't see a big issue here.

> Who can edit OSGeo-related categories on Nabble?

Apparently at least Jason!  If we adopt Nabble in a serious way then I
think we should try to organize who and how these are updated.

Keep in mind that:
  o Some of the lists are are already going into nabble.
  o Some folks are already searching or even reading them via nabble.

But we would be putting some effort into ensuring that all interesting
lists make it into nabble, and we would be "giving away" some karma by
pointing people to the nabble archives from our official pages.

There are other options, such as Norman pointed out a week or two ago.
I will say that "htdig" style do-it-ourselves searching is somewhat
lame in my experience.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org