[Web Comm] RE: login / mailing lists

[Auke Jilderda]

Tyler,

the current mailing lists and discussion forums are indeed not as
intuitive as they could be.  We are expecting to roll out a revamped
implementation in six months or so which will be a big leap forward in
this area.  Among others, one requirement for that was the ability to
configure either (a) subscribe without registering or (b) subscribe
requires registration.  The former is useful for Open Source sites, the
latter for enterprise sites.  As you may know, CollabNet serves both.
Until then, we will have to make due.


Auke

On 18 July 2006 16:16, Tyler Mitchell wrote:
> 
> I was actually quite confused the first few times I went to subscribe
> to mailing lists and couldn't find the subscribe button/link.  It
> made no sense to me why I had to register and login to be able to
> subscribe.
> 
> Since then, I've caught on and I see that subscriptions can all be
> handled directly through email.  It's actually a pain for those who
> are not registered but want to follow mailing list discussions (i.e.
> to consider whether they really want to join/register).  I can't just
> email them a URL and say, go here to subscribe.  I'm afraid we may
> have a whole bunch of people who casually registered just to get
> access to mailing list subscription tools, yet have no more interest
> in OSGeo than than.  So, I don't put any stock in our number of
> registered members.
> 
> All that to say I don't understand why there is the registration
> requirement, apart from putting a small barrier for spammers and
> bots.  I see most other sites don't have this requirement, i.e.
> http://support.openoffice.org/index.html.
> 
> Tyler