Adblock Plus and (a little) more
What should happen to the mailing list? · 2006-11-17 02:24 by Wladimir Palant
I am seriously considering killing Adblock Plus mailing list. It receives several spam mails every day that I have to remove from the queue. The real traffic on the mailing list is very low if compared to what I get as Bugzilla reports, blog comments or private mails (and I don’t want to even try comparing it to the forum traffic). Newsgroup synchronization is broken with the result that posts to the newsgroup don’t manage it to the mailing list (no answer from MozDev admins on this). The most important thing still going on there should be the release announcements — but I can simply send a message asking everybody to subscribe to the RSS feed via RssFwd if they still want the announcements. Anybody having good reasons to keep the mailing list alive?
Comment [13]
Commenting is closed for this article.
chewey · 2006-11-17 02:53 · #
Kill it.
Removing one way to reach you will not be very harmful, obviously makes your life easier and still leaves lots of redundancy – and you still stay reachable via email, for the strong minority with an internet connection without web access ;-)
rick752 · 2006-11-17 04:29 · #
Not me. I always just use the live-bookmark rss feeds anyway to see when you have something new posted. It’s the easiest way for me.
It doesn’t sound like keeping it alive is worth the hassle, Wladimir.
OJ · 2006-11-17 12:02 · #
Its a pity the mail2news-Gateway is not working, cos reading the mailinglist as a newsgroup is very convenient.
What would you do instead? Just private Mails to you? Only posting to the forums possible?
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
This comfort doesn’t matter much if we have 1-2 mails per month (not counting the official announcements). And since I am the one answering these mails anyway a private mail should work just as well. Questions that are meant for public discussion are better posted in the forum anyway, they get far more attention there (registration is not required on the forum).
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Actually, it probably would be good to post forum messages to the newsgroup (not the other way round however). It seems that the NewsSync mod for phpBB could do this.
OJ · 2006-11-17 16:13 · #
That would be (almost) perfect. If newsgroup-posts would go into the forum it would be perfect, but thats just nice for me, I dont know if anybody else would use this.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
No, I don’t want to have the other direction. Forum is pretty much protected against spam, I don’t know whether the same can be said about the newsgroup. So if I am going to do it, it is only to post forum threads on the newsgroup, not the other way round.
CH · 2006-11-17 21:11 · #
Please include me in whatever you decide. I’m too new to have and opinion on this.
fox · 2006-11-18 15:10 · #
You have a mailing list, since when:)
nobody · 2006-11-18 21:03 · #
@fox: the mailing list is existing since the beginning of Adblock Plus on mozdev.org
My opinion: delete the mailing list. No traffic, no questioner, no helper. People have enough options to contact you, so why should they use such a inconvenient relict of old web.
Bob Jonkman · 2006-11-19 04:35 · #
I much prefer mailing lists over Web forums, although I was wondering about the lack of messages on the list.
I’m all in favour of integrating forums and mailing lists. A message or post is just a block
of data to be stored in a database. Data is entered or extracted either by e-mail or a
browser, or a news client, or an IRC client, or a Wiki, or anything else capable of I/O.
The best part of using my mail client is that I use the interface I choose, not the interface
chosen by the forum admin (yes, there are skinnable forums, but still not necessariy the skins
I want to choose for myself). And for those who need them, there’s no Web page yet that works
as well with screen readers as an e-mail client. (“A video screen is just an assistive device
for the visually dependent” —Geoff Eden)
A related best part is that although I subscribe to many different lists, my mail client
interface is the same for all of them. I can treat IETF lists the same way as the microformats
list, the same way as the OpenOffice list, the same way as the Daily Jokes list.
Another best part is that I get all my lists in one place. I don’t have to go browsing to
different parts of the Internets to go find them. Yes, I’ve heard of RSS. But I don’t know of
a way to reply to RSS feeds. Same for bookmarks.
Finally, yet another best part is that the mailing lists are right here in my work environment.
I pretty much live in my e-mail client, so I don’t need to make a mental context change when
I’m working on a mailing list.
Of course, all these prejudices may just be because I’m an e-mail administrator, and a luddite
to boot :-)
—Bob.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
As I mentioned above – I doubt that I can have same quality spam protection for mailing list or newsgroup as I have for the forum. This means that I can install a forum2news gateway if it happens to work properly but I have strong doubts about a news2forum gateway. Currently the “spam protection” on the mailing list makes me more work than it is worth.
Oh, and I know all standard pro-mailing list arguments and in fact I favored the mailing list over the forum when I started this project. But the lack of traffic on the mailing list clearly shows that users prefer the forum. The greatest mailing list isn’t worth anything without anybody to use it…
IceDogg · 2006-11-19 06:02 · #
I agree, you can kill it, fact I forgot I was on the list it has been so long since I seen anything on it.
alta88 · 2006-11-24 19:46 · #
didn’t know there was a mailing list..
but #8 has a lot of valid points. the ideal would be to rss feed the forum posts in a newsgroup fashion. this means:
1)hierarchical threading. it just takes adding a simple refno or reply-to so the client can apply its threading rules.
2)have to get the dates/times right. nature of rss is batch, have to ensure post time is used in the client.
3)make sure summary includes the entire post, with images and html.
4)must download all posts from last – regardless of offline time between them.
5)replying. harder, but i’ve solved this for myself by customizing Tb to launch a lite Fx profile on url click.
it would just take php to build the right mod and thousands of fora could provide useful feeds, rather than the (unusable) stuff now.
i would exclusively use the feed and not the web site, if done right.
Anonym · 2009-04-02 15:53 · #
Very useful files search engine. megaupload-download.com is a search engine designed to search files in various file sharing and uploading sites.
Mateus · 2010-01-30 08:20 · #
http://upgradevendas.com/banner.jpg it’s a banner that is not been filtered!
Rasheed · 2010-03-05 16:37 · #
Adblock Plus does not save permanantly all my filters subscriptions. By time, I find back my filters list so empty. I did download them by 6 in 2weeks. I hope there bugs will be fixed soon.
Nextly, I need to do a filter backup. How to do this ?Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I suggest you start by asking in the forum (https://adblockplus.org/forum/index.php, please create a new topic) rather than in a random three years old blog post. Don’t forget to mention which other extensions are installed – Adblock Plus usually saves everything just fine.