On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 8:36 PM, Mateusz Loskot wrote:

On 10 June 2012 19:25, Jayesh Badwaik wrote:

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On Sunday 10 Jun 2012 19:14:19 Mateusz Loskot wrote:

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I'm wondering, what amount of Arch users and developers use the mailing lists in comparison to the number of people registered to the Arch Forums?

Can we have some basic mailing lists statistics anywhere posted?

Personally, I prefer mailing lists, but I noticed the Forums traffic is order of magnitude larger than the traffic on the lists.

I don't think I answer your question directly but still... I believe people who use a desktop mail client prefer mailing list while those who use the web interface for mail like gmail.com etc prefer forums. This especially works if you are a long term mailing list user and use POP3 mail and hence can search for question using your mail client search.

The reason I posted request for some statistics, is that users may be confused about where to send their requests in order to reach the very core of the Arch community. Certainly, variety is good as people have freedom of choice, but freedom of choice has side effects too.

Anyway, I was just curious what part of developers and users are subscribed to the mailing list and what part use forums.

I, for one, am subscribed to the lists (arch-announce, arch-dev-public, arch-general, aur-general) and also have a forums account. The difference is I read 90% of the mails I get (ignoring the signoff reports or other useless messages) and I haven't been on the forums since a few years. Not quite sure how this works for others.

Also, are all Arch developers subscribed to the mailing lists?

Most likely, yes.

Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net

-- Kwpolska http://kwpolska.tk stop html mail      | always bottom-post www.asciiribbon.org | www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html GPG KEY: 5EAAEA16   | Arch Linux x86_64, zsh, mutt, vim. # vim:set textwidth=70:

On 10 June 2012 19:40, Kwpolska wrote:

On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 8:36 PM, Mateusz Loskot wrote:

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On 10 June 2012 19:25, Jayesh Badwaik wrote:

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On Sunday 10 Jun 2012 19:14:19 Mateusz Loskot wrote:

...

I'm wondering, what amount of Arch users and developers use the mailing lists in comparison to the number of people registered to the Arch Forums?

Can we have some basic mailing lists statistics anywhere posted?

Personally, I prefer mailing lists, but I noticed the Forums traffic is order of magnitude larger than the traffic on the lists.

I don't think I answer your question directly but still... I believe people who use a desktop mail client prefer mailing list while those who use the web interface for mail like gmail.com etc prefer forums. This especially works if you are a long term mailing list user and use POP3 mail and hence can search for question using your mail client search.

The reason I posted request for some statistics, is that users may be confused about where to send their requests in order to reach the very core of the Arch community. Certainly, variety is good as people have freedom of choice, but freedom of choice has side effects too.

Anyway, I was just curious what part of developers and users are subscribed to the mailing list and what part use forums.

I, for one, am subscribed to the lists (arch-announce, arch-dev-public, arch-general, aur-general) and also have a forums account.  The difference is I read 90% of the mails I get (ignoring the signoff reports or other useless messages) and I haven't been on the forums since a few years.

Thanks for the comment. Initially, I signed up and started using forums, but it takes too much time to participate really (Web forums are always more time consuming to me, so I'm not big fan of them, especially if heavy traffic occurs). I think I'll switch to the lists only.

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Also, are all Arch developers subscribed to the mailing lists?

Most likely, yes.

Good to know :) Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net

Personally, I prefer mailing lists,

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So do I. Mailing list is, in my VERY humble opinion, the place where you find higher quality discussion than on web forums.

But, that's just my opinion.

+1 I tend to use ML to catch up the news -I'm subscribed to all MLs- and ask for help while in contrast I wander the forums trying to answer others posts and help fellow archers. I know it sounds weird but it's the *natural way* for me, lol ^_^ -- -msx

On 11 June 2012 09:31, Oon-Ee Ng wrote:

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Mihamina Rakotomandimby wrote:

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On 06/10/2012 09:14 PM, Mateusz Loskot wrote:

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Personally, I prefer mailing lists,

So do I. Mailing list is, in my VERY humble opinion, the place where you find higher quality discussion than on web forums.

But, that's just my opinion.

As a forum moderator I concur. Having said that however, I believe its important that new users are directed to the forums first so that the MLs can be kept as clean as possible (moderating a ML is a different kettle of fish from moderating a forum).

IMO, that is a very good point indeed. Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net

On 11 June 2012 16:11, Karol Blazewicz wrote:

One can subscribe to just a couple forum threads or sections to keep the noise down. Such granularity is not available on the ML as there are just a few Arch ML lists although you can ignore / mute on a per-thread basis too.

Certainly, it's a matter of personal preference, so discussing it may be pointless. My preference to ML is due to this: I find it quicker to use ML in comparison to Web forums. For the forum, I have to do a few extra steps and clicks, for ML... I check my inbox frequently anyway. Also, clearing & filtering ML posts is light-speed fast by simply looking at subject lines and removing or leaving unread for later. Plus, I have more control to categorise/label/search ML posts. (FluxBB search is ineffective.) Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net

On Monday 11 Jun 2012 22:35:15 Jeremiah Dodds wrote:

The nicest setups I've seen, as far as making sure that relevant people see relevant topics, have the mailing list and forum be two frontends to the same set of data. This is a bit of a pain to set up if it's not done from the get-go, but it's not all that hard of a thing to do.

Even I am of the same opinion. Then, people would not miss something that was already present in the forums and would not have to invest time in watching the forums and the mailing list separately. -- Jayesh Badwaik stop html mail | always bottom-post www.asciiribbon.org | www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

On 12 June 2012 08:05, David Benfell wrote:

On 06/10/12 11:14, Mateusz Loskot wrote:

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Personally, I prefer mailing lists, but I noticed the Forums traffic is order of magnitude larger than the traffic on the lists.

In principle, I prefer mailing lists. They are not so nice, however, when searching for information on the web, given what the various sites that harvest the content of mailing lists do to it.

The site: trick [1] has worked for me quite well for long time: "T400 site:http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/" Jeremiah's pointed on two front-ends to the same data, best option I know too. It is not ideal in though, so it is not a problem to setup ML mirror on Gmane. Similarly, Nabble works fairly well as a Forum frontend to ML. [2] I'm a member of OSGeo Foundation where mailing lists [3] only are provided. For those who prefer forum frontent, we have the whole hierarchy mirrored at Nabble. It's worked really well so far. [1] http://goo.gl/clXUB [2] http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/How+do+I+make+the+archives+searchable [3] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo [4] http://osgeo-org.1560.n6.nabble.com/ Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net

On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 12:04 AM, David Benfell wrote:

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On 06/12/12 01:40, Mateusz Loskot wrote:

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The site: trick [1] has worked for me quite well for long time:

"T400 site:http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/"

site: I knew about and is good if you know which site will have the answer you're looking for. I don't always.

Mateusz's suggestion of 'site' was the answer to 'you can't easily search the ML' issue.

But what is 'T400'?

The search phrase. It seems it's a type of Lenovo laptop.

On Wed, 2012-06-13 at 13:16 +0100, Mateusz Loskot wrote:

On 12 June 2012 23:04, David Benfell wrote:

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On 06/12/12 01:40, Mateusz Loskot wrote:

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The site: trick [1] has worked for me quite well for long time:

"T400 site:http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/"

Jeremiah's pointed on two front-ends to the same data, best option I know too. It is not ideal in though, so it is not a problem to setup ML mirror on Gmane. Similarly, Nabble works fairly well as a Forum frontend to ML. [2]

site: I knew about and is good if you know which site will have the answer you're looking for. I don't always.

Yes, this is true. In case of ML, it may be also related to some configuration of mailman. I found that the Google's site: trick does work pretty well with for example OSGeo Foundation mailing lists that I use extensively, e.g. https://www.google.co.uk/search?&q=jpeg+format+site%3Alists.osgeo.org%2Fpipermail%2Fgdal-dev%2F

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Sometimes, I'll find answers on the Ubuntu forums, for example, though I imagine this will be less true in the future as Ubuntu seems to be going down the toilet as a distribution.

:-)

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But what is 'T400'?

Model of Lenovo ThinkPad T400 which I use.

I used as example a needle being searched - as I've scanned the MLs for T400 infos lately :)

Best regards,

I "collected" mailing list mails with Mozilla mailers and their search options where very helpful. Today I'm using Evolution (the mails are also on my machine) and it's less good, but anyway better than searching Archives by Google and other search engines. Searching Archives is a PITA, but once you access the emails with a MUA, it's very comfortable. Btw. usually Arch and Ubuntu Wikis are the best sources for search engines. YMMV! - Ralf