[VOTE] Should we ditch google group categories?

[m...@mattbrailsford.com]

Hey Guys,

Just wonder what people think in terms of ditching the google groups categories? or do you find them useful to organise things?

The main reason to keep them would be that, to keep things in a certain kind of order, however with that comes a downside. The downside is that all initial posts must be made via the website, rather than the traditional mailing list way of just email an email address.

I just ran a test and you can still just email the groups email address and it will come through, however topics created that way have no category assigned and would thefore not show any any of the listed categories.

So, the options:

1) Ditch categories and just have it as a traditional mailing list (a bit messier, but easier to post to)

2) Keep it as it is and people just have to use the UI to create posts

3) Allow people to email in, but others who use the UI moderate incoming posts and categorise them (time consuming and unfair to put that demand on people).

Wadda you think?

Matt

[kal9001]

In my experience so far Google groups is actually quite buggy. I was disappointed when I first started using it because I expected more from Google, I know its free but hey...So is phpBB.
Also the inclusion of the quoted text in every single reply unless you manually delete it all first out of the reply box is frankly idiotic. MANY people for years have made suggestions that this should be disabled somehow or an option to filter it? nope......

Anyway that's my moaning over with. It seems to make sense that with the small number of us at the moment we don't need a cavernous forum. For the most part I usually just click "view all topics" anyway to see if and what new stuff has appeared.

I tend to use this a more of a forum than a mailing list, Others may have different opinions to that, What you would want is a way to parse a header file in the email so you could sate something like <category>Electronics</category> and when you mail it off it would know that its supposed to be a new topic in that category, This may already be a poorly documented feature?

Personally I think Google groups is not ideal and the possibility of moving onto something like phpBB or similar could be a long term goal, setup is automatic, You just need a php parser and high level access to a database on any OS with a range of DB options (Would have to check there site for which exactly are supported)

(I have had phpBB running on my Raspberry PI with MySQL and php5 plus a couple of additional php librarys all straight from the raspian repo's with no messing about. All you have to do is give the setup script a username and password for the database and it sets it all up for you then deletes itself, leaving a fully working forum.

 

[Matt Brailsford]

Hey Kev,

Appreciate your feedback, and long term goal is to move to something better in the future, however there is no point investing time and effort into this at this point while the group is still growing and there are plenty of other things that require our attention, so right now, google groups is good enough (as you know I work as a web dev so setting up a true forum isn't an issue, it's just time consuming and fiddly).

The only thing I'm getting at here is whether the way google groups is setup is how people want to use it? and whether it could perform better if people would rather deal with it as a standard mailing list instead? The discussion of moving to something better can be held at a later date.

Many thanks

Matt

[kal9001]

Well as I say I just tend to click the view all topics anyway so that eliminates the category functions anyway. The reason for this is because the category screen doesn't actually show you when a new topic or reply has been added to something within that category so in other words....Yea its crap you may as well just make it all an in line mailing list :P

[m...@mattbrailsford.com]

Cool, cheers Kev. Must admit, I tend to end up doing the same myself with the view all.

[m...@mattbrailsford.com]

What the hell, I've turned them off for now so lets see how that goes (looks like I can re-enable if we like). If you want to just email the group now instead, you can email

barns...@googlegroups.com

Matt