Re: Important Info on comp.databases.postgresql.general

Currently the mailing list is also hosted in a newsgroup at
new.postgresql.org. The news group is not "Official" so it is not
carried by all news servers. There are some users who can not
participate in a mailing list comfortably for one reason or another.
Some of these individuals would like their local USENET provider to
carry the news group. Because postgresql isn't official they will not
do this. So there is now a movement to make the list official.

The extra traffic I believe is coming from the discussion of the
USENET people trying to get this done. Most USENET folk are good
manor people just like you find on the lists.

There are a lot of politics involved in USENET that are not present in
your typical mailing list. This is primarily because mailing lists
are hosted by the project/group and involve a single mail server where
as USENET is many servers and many topics.

As near as I can tell the main person pushing for making the list an
official news group has inadvertently, or maybe advertently, offended
someone with his politics, and/or lack of knowledge of the USENET
process. Nothing big but with politics comes grudges etc.

The other thing that I have noticed is people seem to get into more
flame wars on USENET compared to mailing lists. There are many
reasons for this but they are irrelevant. Part of this process of
flaming and what not is the jerk forged message to piss people off.
In particular I think the forger was attempting to sway the
creditability , of the person being forged, to the people that make
the USENET decisions. The chatter is there to inform anyone who might
be fooled.

If this push is successful are we likely to see a few jerks posting on
the list via USENET? Yes, but I believe we will see an increase in
useful posts from people who would not otherwise participate.

Another downside is the email addresses on the list will get spread
around more which increase the change of them getting harvested by a
spam mer. USENET people tend to get around this by using fake email
addresses for USENET that can be modified by a human when the real
address is needed. Mailing lists typically don't mask the email
address, and since you can't fake an address if you wish to get email,
everyone on the list will increase there changes of being spammed, but
maybe only slightly. This isn't necessarily a big deal because
several people have a separate mailing list address and/or have spam
prevention in place.

Wow this turned into a bigger message then I intended :-)

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 16:03:48 -0700, Net Virtual Mailing Lists
<mailinglists(at)net-virtual(dot)com> wrote:
> Yeah.. I'm with you.. I don't really know what all of this is about - I
> like the way the Postgres mailing list works as it is.... Are any of the
> changes being discussed here going to change the content or how we
> receive the mailing lists?..
>
> .. The only change I've noticed is that in all the time of reading this
> list I've not seen jerks posting forged messages like that....
> Certainly not a positive change, but I'm not sure it can be attributed to
> what is going on...
>
> - Greg
>
>
>
> >??? As a longstanding reader of the pgsql-
> >mailinglists, (including via news.postgresql.org on
> >occasion), all I see is some outsiders trying to help
> >us "fix" a problem that does not exist. And yes, I
> >have read most of the messages that have passed by in
> >these threads. After all that, I still don't see the
> >benefit.
> >
> >Perhaps that is why these conversations have been
> >carried on almost totally by people who do not post to
> >the pgsql lists.
>
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