Survey posted 2012-02-20 08:41 by Travis.

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FR0ST P0ST! :D

I kid, of course; I miss the old days. Anyway, yes, I did think ticalc.org had mailing lists, but something is vaguely nagging at my memory about a news article a few years ago about the lists shutting down. I know that Travis has been organizing the archives of mailing list discussions, which is excellent. As far as the question, I know that at one point there was a huge community sentiment that ticalc.org should have discussion boards, and I even remember discussing some of my projects on that Project Discussion section of the site (?). However, I feel that at this point community sites like Cemetech and co. are popular and active enough to maintain development discussions in the community, and that mailing lists wouldn't quite have a place anymore. Indeed, I think a lot of that has to do with the recent members added to the programming community in the past few years growing up with fora rather than mailing lists, and thus finding mailing lists something of a foreign concept.

Technically, the lists are still up, believe it or not (or they were, the last time I checked—someone posts a message roughly every three years or so :-P), though the available categories are pretty out-of-date and there have been no working archives for years.

Although there are a lot of forums out there now, I don't know of too many mailing lists, so I thought that this might be something fairly unique to offer. One problem is that, as you mentioned, forums seem to be the trend nowadays.

Lists still have appeal to me personally—subscription is usually simpler than forum registration, the new messages come to me rather than me having to go out and fetch them on the web, I can configure my email client to handle messages and threads however I want, and they're generally “lightweight” and not prone to slow loading times and downtime which seem to plague most large forum sites I know of. In some ways, lists are actually more flexible than forums but seem to sadly be viewed as old-fashioned nowadays.

Yeah, it always seemed with the mailing lists, they would go months without any activity, and then someone would randomly ask something through them, and then all of a sudden they would get a whole bunch of activity. And then it would die down, and they would go months without any activity again.

I think getting the mailing lists active again would be interesting, if only because seeing all those new mails popping up always seemed to have a way of getting people talk about things and discussing and such, and that was fun.

I am not sure what it would entail exactly, but it is something that I think would appeal to a segment of the TI calc programming population and I would be interested, for sure.

I think the mailing lists would be more useful if they were also on http://gmane.org/ because then one could read them and post messages using an NNTP-client.