As you may know, the freebsd-questions mailing list is a veritable flood of information. It has an amazingly good "signal to noise" ratio; by that I mean there isn't much off-topic chatter, and most questions are answered in an accurate and timely fashion. However, it is a flood - several hundred posts a day, usually.
I don't like getting mailing lists in digest format. It is too hard to follow individual threads and too hard to form replies, etc. I don't like any web-based bulletin board system yet. Some are barely usable, but most are just too painful to work with. My favorite way to get information remains good old fashioned newsgroups. There are excellent newsreaders out there, that let you do things like ignore threads and obnoxious posters, watch particular threads, etc. I use the newsreader that comes with Mozilla, because I find that the way I use newsreaders and emailers is so much the same, I don't want to use two separate programs to do it. Another good one is the gnus package in Emacs, my favorite editor. But I've never quite gotten comfortable with it, so I've stuck with Netscape/Mozilla.
Anyway, I was glad to come across Gmane.org. It provides a mail <-> newsreader gateway, so you can read mailing lists via your newsreader. It makes keeping up with the heavy volume of the freebsd-questions list much easier. Check it out for lots of other, mostly technical, mailing lists too.
Gmane -- Mail To News And Back Again
No comments:
Post a Comment