[sdiy] message board

[Colin Hinz]

 On Fri Jun 29  4:22 , Randaleem  sent:

> But a yahoo group presence for SDIY would still be a
> good thing IMO. As I said, no one HAS to change
> anything of the way they deal with the group now.
> (except the posting address.) There would just be
> additional capability for those who wish to use it. 

Yeah, except for Yahoo's continuing hate-on for plain-text format (messes with the ad delivery and web beacons, you see). There isn't any "no friggin' HTML-mail" group setting, and keeping the list HTML-free is a pointless and losing battle unless it's enforced by the delivery mechanism.

> Re: Yahoo. Most people don't want messages with
> attachments anyways due to spam and virii. But having
> a group website where files and pictures can be stored
> and viewed is pretty useful IMO. Beats ascii art.
> Admuncher takes care of any other Yahoo issues; and
> the PGOffline program and service handles the
> archiving and searching issues you mention. All work
> together seamlessly.

Actually, the ASCII art's pretty rare these days. Mostly, list members post images on their own webspace. And these webspaces, in many cases, are intended for a more general consumption than just the S-DIY list. 

And admuncher may be wonderful, but it looks like you need to be using a browser to be using it. So much for keeping the junk out of one's inbox. So much for using an e-mail client for participating in a mailing list. Oh, and it costs money, too. As for PGOffline, it claims to retrieve Yahoogroups attachments from the YG website, except that these days the attachments aren't stored. At all. Not for a nanosecond. So where these attachments are supposed to come from is a mystery to me. Oh, and it costs money, too, unless you want a crippled version. (Personally, I don't see PGOffline being able to do anything that the very capable yahoo2mbox perl script can't, and the latter is freeware.)

>Anyways, it's not for me to decide. Just pointing out
>a viable and minimally upsetting alternative.

Well, I think it has PITA written all over it in blinking multicoloured letters, and with smileys and dancing LOL's.

- Colin