Looking for MLM with web-based interface for users.

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On 16 Feb 2003, at 4:45pm, sgarman at einstein.unh.edu wrote:
> As the discussion list has grown, the volume of mail has reached a point
> where many users want to stay involved in some discussions but not
> others ...

  I believe they are looking for a feature of mail/news software called
"threading", which keeps track of threads-of-conversation.

> They are not technically trained enough to figure out mail filtering
> software or otherwise deal with the problem on their end.

  That strikes me as a rather bad attitude.  They want their own experience
to be improved, but refuse to invest anything in that improvement?  That
does not bode well.

> What they want is to be able to fully interact with the list via a web
> interface, including posting replies.

  Bruce Dawson has/had something like that setup for GNHLUG at
<http://news.gnhlug.org/>, which is based on PHP-Nuke.

  A word of warning: Be sure anything you setup gates appropriately in both
directions.  Put more bluntly, do not placate the web-weenies at the expense
of email-die-hards (unless you are sure the latter are an insignificant
minority).

  For example, the system Bruce setup unfortunately had several problems
that displeased many listmembers.  One was that everything that came from
the website used the same "From" address.  Another was that the web gateway
did not provide email threading information ("Message-ID" and "In-Reply-To"
headers).  The gateway also passed (often mangled) HTML tags through to the
largely text-only mailing list, which made things very hard to read.

  None of those problems are insurmountable, but they need to be considered.  
I would strongly recommend any web-based system require user registration,
with email address verification.  The problem of filling in the "From" line
is easily solved by using unique user IDs which come from the website
domain.  (For example, if I registered on <news.gnhlug.org> as "bscott", my
postings from the website could show as from <bscott at news.gnhlug.org>.)  
Stripping HTML tags, and generating and preserving Message-IDs, are almost
trivially easy.

  (There is also a more philosophical point about web interfaces encouraging
less of a community, since they do not require the same psychological
investment that a subscribed mailing list does.  Whether or not that is a
concern to your group depends, of course, on your group.)

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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