Re: Usenet newsgroup for Octave proposed

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-May-2006, Madhusudan Singh wrote:

| I think that having an Octave newsgroup would be a very good idea. Usenet 
| tends to reduce the amount of bandwidth spent as one need download only 
| messages that one is interested in,

Is that a big problem these days?  Are you still using a dial-up
connection to the net?  You can have a news-like interface to Octave
via www.gname.org (web, nntp, or rss).

| and the danger of exposing one's email 
| address to spammers also goes down (can use spam.invalid domain names, etc.).

You can do that here too, though I prefer discussions with people who
don't mind using their real names.

| I get about 10-15 octave related emails a day, if not more. I am usually not 
| interested in more than 75% of them. Utter waste of space, and time spent 
| deleting them.

First, unless you are using a really lame mail reader, you should be
able to filter the messages to a separate inbox so you only have to
look at them when you want to.  Or, now that we've moved the mailing
lists to a new server that runs Mailman, you can shoose to receive a
daily digest instead.  Or, use gmane.  If none of these options
please you, then I'm not sure what to suggest, other than maybe
unsubscribe?

| As to archives, most newsgroups are archived, so that is not 
| an advantage of mailing lists over newsgroups. If some people do not like the 
| newsgroups for whatever reason, we can try to construct a mail to news 
| gateway that can keep both current.

OK, are you volunteering to help moderate the list postings that come
from the newsgroup?  Currently, the reason you don't see much spam on
the Octave lists is because posting is restricted to subscribers.
There is still a significant amount of spam that comes to the lists.
Some is filtered automatically, but a lot still requires manual
intervention.  If you want a news -> mail gateway, then I think the
volume of spam will increase to the point of making it a real hassle
to moderate.

Since the Octave lists do not really have a lot of traffic and there
are already various options for reading the lists, I don't see the
need for a separate newsgroup.

jwe