> The only thing missing in a mailing list is a good archive for new members; the web UIs are usually terrible. Personally, I wish I could just get an archive file (zip, tar, etc) of a certain period of time.
Three data points/opinions:
- at least some mailing lists let you download an archive file for a given month, e.g. [0].
- I much prefer navigating the web interface of a mailing list than navigating a forum, simply because mostforumslackproperthreading, not to mention the bazillion of blinking .GIFs, unnecessary Javascript and all that other superfluous crap that is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
- Not to mention that searching a mailing list archive is trivial if you keep it locally and even if you don’t, it will still work. Trying to find something on e.g. talk.maemo.org, I always have to resort to Google with some site: operator, and even then the results are usually worse than those returned by a comparable search run on the web archive of a mailing list.
Three data points/opinions:
- at least some mailing lists let you download an archive file for a given month, e.g. [0].
- I much prefer navigating the web interface of a mailing list than navigating a forum, simply because most forums lack proper threading, not to mention the bazillion of blinking .GIFs, unnecessary Javascript and all that other superfluous crap that is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
- Not to mention that searching a mailing list archive is trivial if you keep it locally and even if you don’t, it will still work. Trying to find something on e.g. talk.maemo.org, I always have to resort to Google with some site: operator, and even then the results are usually worse than those returned by a comparable search run on the web archive of a mailing list.
[0] http://mail63.csoft.net/pipermail/ldmud-talk/