End this mailing list?

[Yaron Koren]

Hi everyone,

I've had the thought over the last few months to get rid of this mailing list/Google group, and move all discussions about Semantic Forms over to the two Semantic MediaWiki mailing lists: semediawiki-user (for users), and semediawiki-devel (for developers).

When this list was started about two years ago, Semantic Forms was a very new and rather buggy extension for SMW; at this point, it's in use on I believe something like 80% of active SMW installations. It's still buggy, :) but the posts on the list are less about bugs now and more about usage and feature requests. So you could say that the SF mailing list has been a victim of its own success: due to the technical improvements and community support that the mailing list has enabled, SF has become a stable part of what people consider to be SMW, and thus there's less of a need to have a separate discussion area.

If you're curious, you can see the monthly volume of emails on the three lists here:

http://groups.google.com/group/semantic-forms/about

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=semediawiki-user

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=semediawiki-devel

There are currently about 100 messages a month to the SF mailing list, and a slightly higher number of the semediawiki-user list, and about 50 a month on the semediawiki-devel list. Altogether, I don't think getting rid of this list would overwhelm the other two, especially since (a) some emails are sent to both the SF and SMW-user list, and (b) other questions sent to the SF list are really about SMW or one of the other extensions.

I see a number of advantages in moving everything to the two SMW mailing lists:
1. one less mailing list for users to join
2. reduced confusion about which mailing list to write to for which questions, especially the borderline cases, such as anything to do with templates
3. makes it clearer that Semantic Forms is a part of the SMW world, as opposed to some specialized application
4. increases the feeling of a single SMW community, that one can address all of at the same time
5. allows separation of emails about Semantic Forms development from those about SF usage, since they'd now be on separate lists

On the other hand, I can think of two disadvantages:

1. it increases email volume to people who really only want to be on one list or the other. There may be people on this list who don't want to get general emails about SMW (though I think that would be a mistake); and of course there will be people on the semediawiki-user list who aren't interested in SF. I should note that, even if people on this list think it's a good idea, I would still need to get permission from the SMW mailing list people, so the second one is really a separate issue.
2. the SMW mailing lists have a pretty shoddy track record of accepting emails from new users - sometimes emails wait for a week or longer before getting confirmed. I probably won't do the move unless I can get myself and the other administrators of this list to be made administrators of the SMW lists as well; which would hopefully speed things up quite a bit.

And there might be more I haven't thought of. Any thoughts?

-Yaron

[Laurent Alquier]

Considering SF should be included into SMW as a standard anyway, the move would make sense (I can't imagine managing a SMW without SF).

That would also prevent the kind of cross list duplication we have seen in the past weeks.

- Laurent Alquier

--
- Laurent Alquier
http://www.linfa.net

[Dan Bolser]

* '''Merge'''. One list is better than two for the reasons given. --~~~~

[Patrick Nagel]

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Hi Yaron,

I think it would be a good idea to merge the lists, if the SMW lists' admins
concur. The advantages of a unified list clearly prevail.

The only concern I have, is, what appears to be a general "shoddiness" of the
SourceForge mailing list system. Sometimes a message that has only been sent
once comes through the list multiple times, or a mail doesn't get accepted for
a long time due to some weird greylisting settings (just happened to me
yesterday). And while we are at it: I dislike SourceForge's mailing list
archive... although it seems to be getting better.
Google Groups seems to be a more solid / reliable mailing list service provider.

Patrick.

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[Martien]

+1 for merging

dreamwish: Semantic Google Wave

On Jul 14, 7:24 pm, Yaron Koren <yaro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've had the thought over the last few months to get rid of this mailing
> list/Google group, and move all discussions about Semantic Forms over to the
> two Semantic MediaWiki mailing lists: semediawiki-user (for users), and
> semediawiki-devel (for developers).
>
> When this list was started about two years ago, Semantic Forms was a very
> new and rather buggy extension for SMW; at this point, it's in use on I
> believe something like 80% of active SMW installations. It's still buggy, :)
> but the posts on the list are less about bugs now and more about usage and
> feature requests. So you could say that the SF mailing list has been a
> victim of its own success: due to the technical improvements and community
> support that the mailing list has enabled, SF has become a stable part of
> what people consider to be SMW, and thus there's less of a need to have a
> separate discussion area.
>
> If you're curious, you can see the monthly volume of emails on the three
> lists here:
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/semantic-forms/about
>
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=semediawiki-user
>

> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=semediawiki-d...

[David Gómez]

It is a little pitiful to leave this list
:_-(
:-)
... but I believe that the exposed reasons for merging have sense.

+1

dvdgmz.

[Yaron Koren]

Alright, thanks for all the feeback (Dan - haha!). So, it looks like this mailing list may be coming to an end soon. Patrick - you raised an interesting point about SourceForge - I had always assumed that the slowness of emails on the SMW lists was due to the admins not handling stuff quickly, but maybe they're just technical issues. I'm waiting to hear back now from the SMW admins about that and other issues - I'll let everyone know.

-Yaron

[David Gómez]

I'm thinking that might be a good idea to use '[SF]' in the subject of
SemanticForms related messages in SMW list, this will allow us to
distinguish them from others.

[Dan Bolser]

Mailman does allow 'topics' to be configured... perhaps a general
'extensions' topic would be better than a specific sf one?


2009/7/16 David Gómez <dvd...@gmail.com>:

[Yaron Koren]

It looks like 'topics' in mailman are just set by the system looking for certain expressions in the subject line:

http://www.list.org/mailman-member/node30.html

Given that, it seems like there's no conflict between having a convention for marking messages and using topics... maybe it makes sense, as David suggested, to try marking emails as related to a specific extension by using the acronym, like "SF", "SD" (for Semantic Drilldown), "SQFT" (for Semantic Query Form Tool), etc. Of course, not everyone will use any convention we come up with, and some cases are in a gray area anyway between different extensions, but it would be interesting to try out, I think.

-Yaron

[najevi]

I've just today needed to search the archives of both mailing lists
for the first time. The sourceforge archives are nowhere near as
friendly to search as this google groups archive.

If one list was to be moved I'd be keeping the google groups mailing
list and ditching the sourceforge mailing list.
As the number of SMW/SF users increases it might pay to consider which
mailing list is more user friendly to users as opposed to developers.

[Yaron Koren]

I agree that Google Groups is a nicer solution (though I don't know what you mean about "users as opposed to developers" - Google Groups seems better for everyone. :) ). I believe someone else made a similar point before. But I think that's, unfortunately, a separate issue - the SMW lists aren't going to move to a Google Group named "Semantic Forms". If the SMW lists do move to Google Groups, that would be great, though; and the semediawiki-user list is probably the place to discuss that.

-Yaron

[Dan Bolser]

2009/7/16 najevi <naj...@gmail.com>:

I really hate the SourceForge mailing list archives too. I complained
about it to them, and they said they had to abandon the default
mailman archives because of performance issues, but that they were
'working on something better'.

If you feel strongly enough, vote for this SF 'idea', here:

Idea #113: The SF project mailing list archive interface is poor.
https://sourceforge.net/apps/ideatorrent/sourceforge/ideatorrent/idea/113/


Somehow I think if they knew that people were jumping to Google in
frustration, they would quickly work on making the archive better.


Another solution is to use Nabble, but I don't particularly like that
either! i.e. I don't know how to navigate the site... A quick google
turned up this page:

http://www.nabble.com/SMW-testimonials-page-created-tt23603332.html


but I don't know how to go from there to 'recent posts' for example.


Dan.


> >
>

[Yaron Koren]

Two notes:

- the 'SF' Dan was talking about was SourceForge, not Semantic Forms, in case anyone was confused. :) It's a popular acronym...

- based on some web searching, it seems pretty to easy to move a user base over from a mailman list to a Google Groups one - you basically just copy and paste a long list of email addresses. Moving over the mail archives seems to be impossible, but at least it means we're not necessarily stuck with mailman forever, which I think is good news.

-Yaron