[Wine] Forum Software Update and mailing list gateway

[James McKenzie]

On 9/3/11 7:48 PM, dimesio wrote:
> jorl17 wrote:
>> The question boils down to this:
>> During that time, was there a noticeable increase of difficulty in terms of solving threads? In other words: did the lack of support from the mailing list visibly affect the "help"?
> No. And for the record, I have read every single new post on the forum every day since I joined in 2008.  The forum says I have made 3624 posts during that time That's a distant second to vitamin's 6087. Neither one of us is on the mailing list.
>
>
>> It just doesn't feel right to me to cut off the option of accessing this joint discussion through another "gateway"
> Nothing says you couldn't subscribe to both if they were split.
>
> IRC is completely separate from both the forum and mailing list; that doesn't seem to bother anybody.
>
Dimensio:

You have a very valid point here.  If we had much better spam control in 
the mailing list gateway, I would agree that keeping the list active is 
viable.  However, it this is not true and thus when we got hit last week 
with 32 messages from one spammer (and there were several that day) all 
of them ended up in my folder for this list.  Singling them out and 
running them through a spam learning program is a great effort and my 
false positive rate increases.  So, there are 'three' forks to this:

1.  Upgrade PHPBB to a newer version that has better spam capture and 
kill features.
2.  Split the mailing list away from the forums.  This was originally 
debated and several Wine supporters left because 'we know the spam storm 
is coming and I don't want to deal with this.'  This option is dead and 
was rejected by the majority (at that time) of the mailing list and 
forum users.
3.  Kill the mailing list off.

So, either option 1 (which I really, really, really like) because we 
retain the folks on the mailing list that have a great deal of 
knowledge, like Martin, and we get current, supported forum software, or 
option 3 (which I don't like, the mailing list is archived at one or 
more places and the forum search function really does not work well, in 
its current form) are the options.  As I said, I like, desire, love, 
etc. the idea of upgrading/updating the Forum software to a more current 
version.  This allows folks choice and the ability to do many things 
which we cannot do with the current version.

As to 'choice', I belong to both the mailing list AND the Forums.  That 
allows me to reply, as I am now, via a mail reader and if I don't have 
access  to my mail account, I can go to the Forums and reply.  Thus, I 
feel that I have the 'best of both worlds' and the worst.

I would implore the site administrators to investigate and quickly 
update the Forum software so that we can rid ourselves of the now daily 
spam runs for all sorts of items like DVDs and Coach purses and 
electronic components.  I want this area to stay focused on the Wine 
project and very, very little else.

Thank you.

James