Bruce, I don't know who complained about the "ease of use" but I never saw a complaint- and I was on a good portion of the P2P lists from the day they were opened. I can't imagine people have trouble using email. The web management system was a bit messy, but a little work and that could have been fixed right up without replacing the system with these message boards. Since I am not very familiar with the backend software the classic P2P used, I can't give you an arichitecture- however I think the chalenges that were faced were minor, compared to the far inferior product we now have.

The unfortunate thing is the Wiley DID take the time to re-do something that didn't need to be re-done. Too much of the community is gone already. If you just moved the servers you would have been offline for a few days and we could have kept going.

If the mailing lists were up while working on the new system, Wiley could have been getting feedback all along from the users of P2P and ensuring the users would be happy with the new system. Wiley could have ASKED US about the concerns and we could have let you know how much we cared about them- and even thought about solutions. The COMMUNITY could have WORKED TOGETHER.

Instead, the community was torn from us- as we waited for the mailing lists to return. In the backround, Wiley was tearing apart the community we loved and turning it into "just another" forum. Something that requires a seperate visit. Something that requires YET ANOTHER login name and password (Because I don't have enough of them to remember and keep track of). My email program is ALWAYS open - I can QUICKLY answer and ask questions. This is just a chore.

There is no need to filter anything. I am confused as to why all of a sudden the P2P lists need filtering at all. There was no spam problem. There was no impersonation problem. There were none of the problems that Wiley is concerned with. So some messages had a long header trail- ya know what, I don't care and I don't think I ever saw anyone complain about it.

What strms? I have never seen an "Out of Office Storm" on a list. Yes, on occasion I did get Out of office messages. There's that one person "Sina" (I think) who had a foreign language Out Of Office mesage that was particularly anoying to me. However, "storms" don't take place because most email servers won't send a Out of Office reply more than once a day to the same sender. The mailing lists FROM: was the person who sent the message, not the list- the Out of Office message went to the FROM: address in most cases. The "Storms", if they ever happened, would be self limiting. However, I don't recall ever seeing one.

Never a problem. If you do want to filter email addresses, it is easily done with a pretty basic REGEX replacement on the message. Any decent PERL programmer could probably write the REGEX in about 5 minutes- and that's including testing. Yahoo Groups handles the harvesting "problem" just that way. Not dificult to implement at all.

Remember- we are all PROGRAMMERS. Wouldn't it have been great if Wiley came to the COMMUNITY and asked us what we thought about the problems BEFORE this change was made. You know, Programmers helping other programmers. There was even a mailing list about arcitecture that would have been appropriate to discuss the re-design of the web front end to the lists.

Tha fact is, we know about the risk of email harvesting. You think there needs to be a waning about it? Add it- it's not like the new legal mumbo-jumbo (which WROX never needed before) isn't confusing enough. You can add something to it about email harvesting.

The plain fact is, the issues your rasing, are not issues for the users of the system. We want out MAILING LISTS. We do not want forums. There are forums *ALL OVER* the internet filled with unanswered questions or no activity at all.

The plain fact is, developers don't like using web forms. I don't like that my spellcheker isn't in the way of preventing my horid spelling to be seen by the world. I don't like that I can't create an archive of messages that are important to me and organize them in a way that makes sence to me. In to folders that I set up that meet my needs.

Please, give us our mailing lists back!


Hal Levy
Daddyshome, LLC