[SAC] Mailing List Administration

[Allan Doyle]

Remember that simply keeping the mailman archives publicly readable  
ensures that they are indexed by all the search engines. Anything  
else like Nabble is primarily providing additional user-friendliness.  
So I don't see it as critical.

Furthermore, the 2nd most critical function we have is searchability  
that arises from being available on Google et. al. so by definition,  
we're outsourcing critical functionality.

The first critical function? Developing useful content to be searched  
in the first place...

	Allan


On Jan 15, 2007, at 16:24, Frank Warmerdam wrote:

> 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
>
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-- 
Allan Doyle
+1.781.433.2695
adoyle at eogeo.org