On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 6:28 PM, Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com wrote:
can explain what it is that makes google groups suck, maybe I can do something about it. Send those comments to me offlist, though.
I can't think of a way to make it not suck so sending these thoughts here as they relate still to the current discussion about the wine-users gateway...
I think the problem is more inherit in newsgroup design. Like you can view topics in but there is no way to have topics broken in to categories. I guess this is historical as the traditional newsgroup structure would have each group be its own catagory if there was enough demand
example newsgroup structure would be
comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine.general comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine.devel comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine.solaris comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine.ubuntu
etc
but we just have comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine because the demand metric is not high enough to have separate groups for each category. Plus it would make searching a bitch
This is where forums really shine over google groups or a traditional mailing list to forum gateway. I am all for having mailman cross post to a forum category but ideally the forum should be an alternative front end with categories for wine-users and the wine newsgroup.
I don't think it would be any trouble to get Tom's site to have a gateway that pulled wine-users and the newsgroup feeds in read-only. If someone wants to post to those forums they would still have to use traditional means ala mailing list, google groups, but it would provide a unified location for read-only access. Of course if the gateway is turned back on I guess wine-users and the newsgroups are really a single source.
So to recap. Its all about categories for me.