In addition to concern to the potential distribution of spam through the use of a discussion list, there are other factors that led us towards a web-based forum rather than a pure email discussion list.

Ease of use

A common complaint with the old Wrox P2P forum was that it was difficult to use and the postings become cluttered with useless email header, reply quoting, etc. For an example look here http://p2p.wrox.com/archive/access/2003-03/109.asp

Unfortunately, the many different email clients in use reply to messages in varying ways. This makes it virtually impossible to filter out the useless information from the valuable topic posts and replies.


Out of Office Storms

All it takes is for one person to turn on their "out of office" agent and it all breaks loose. That person replies to a posting automatically with "Sorry, I'm out of the....", this message gets distributed to everyone subscribed to the list. Then someone else has an out of office agent and it replies to the first out of office message. And so on... And so on... Once again, since different email clients reply in different ways, it's extremely difficult to filter these types of replies.


Mass Marketing Email Address Harvesting

If you looked at the link I provided above, you'll see that there are member email addresses included in the reply headers. With the rampant use of web-crawling email harvesters, this is really not a good thing. We take your privacy seriously so having your email address exposed is unacceptable to us. The new Wrox P2P Forum keeps your email address private.


We are always open to new ideas. So what are your thoughts on these issues I've raised? How can we work-around these, in our estimation, serious problems with the discussion email list structure?

Bruce Luckcuck
Director, Applications & Support Services
Wiley Publishing, Inc.