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  #11 (permalink)  
Old June 3rd, 2003, 07:31 PM
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I have to agree with everyone else: spamming and spoofing weren't a problem on the old lists, which were convenient and, generally, very useful.
  #12 (permalink)  
Old June 3rd, 2003, 07:37 PM
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First let me say thank you to you all for registering with the new P2P site.

I would like to take a moment and address one concern about why we chose to switch to a web forum rather than keep the old discussion list structure. No matter how misguided our thought processes maybe, the reasons I stated earlier were the only reasons for the switch to a web forum. I have heard many conflicting stories about spam on the old P2P site, but the initial decision was that with a Forum we could have the most control over stopping spam and identity spoofing. The only way to do that with a discussion list is to use passwords in emails and heavy moderation that we felt would be too hard to newer users and require too many resources to moderate.

If you visit any other Wiley website such as http://www.wiley.com , http://www.dummies.com , or http://www.cliffsnotes.com you will find that heavy web advertising is not the way Wiley does business. Wiley has a long tradition (almost 200 years) of book publishing and as such that is our focus. We use these websites to add value to our customers not to try gain extra pennies from click through adds that only annoy the people we are trying to serve.

Having said that we also decided to launch the new P2P site as quickly as possible and see if their was a large enough interest in the post through email feature for us to develop a solution while retaining the Forum website which is far less cluttered and easier for newer users to navigate.

Obviously you have posted your strong desires on this subject, and while I can’t commit to anything on the first day of the re-launch I can say that I will look into what it would take to add this feature and post a response here in the next few days with my findings..

Thank you for taking the time to let us know your concerns, as we really are trying to make this the best site for new users and programming veterans both.

Thank you,
James Sample
Director, IS-Infrastructure
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
  #13 (permalink)  
Old June 3rd, 2003, 08:24 PM
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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.
  #14 (permalink)  
Old June 3rd, 2003, 09:07 PM
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About email headers on the post viewed via web, are there no other way to remove this headers when viewed via web? It was the only thing that annoys people who view the post via web.

Spams? Well I guess there are still better solutions than ending up with a web based forum.

just a thought,



enzo c",)
  #15 (permalink)  
Old June 3rd, 2003, 09:25 PM
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All of the problems mentioned so far were real problems, however they had partial solutions. Out of Office replies, I rarely got but when they did appear I had some rules set up to deal with them. Spam was annoying, however this is mostly caught by my spam filter (there are a few free pop proxy style spam filters around, including a version of spamassassin). On a side note it may be possible to filter out all email addresses posted. I don't know of the tecnical resources out there but there are plenty of example regular expressions around to identify email addresses, which could then be replaced with somthing else eg <email address>.

I'd agree that the page was hard to read with the replies, headers, multipart messages etc, however I didn't use the site to post messages, and rarely went to the site to view posted messages.

I'm not saying that was there before was perfect, or even good, just that it worked well for me.

regards
David Cameron
  #16 (permalink)  
Old June 3rd, 2003, 10:00 PM
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Quote:
quote:Originally posted by bluckcuck
Ease of use
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.

Quote:
quote:
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.
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.

Quote:
quote:
Out of Office Storms
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.

Quote:
quote:
Mass Marketing Email Address Harvesting
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
  #17 (permalink)  
Old June 3rd, 2003, 10:03 PM
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Quote:
quote:Originally posted by David Cameron
 I'd agree that the page was hard to read with the replies, headers, multipart messages etc, however I didn't use the site to post messages, and rarely went to the site to view posted messages.
David, I think you would be hard pressed to find many people who used the web site for anything but "searching" the archives. Perhaps that's the problem. The folx at Wiley don't understand that we only used the web interface to manage subscriptions or search the archives, not read messages.


Hal Levy
Daddyshome, LLC
  #18 (permalink)  
Old June 3rd, 2003, 10:35 PM
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Sorry Hal, I was trying to be broadminded here and was assuming that other people might have used the system differently from the way I used it. To be frank I'd echo you comments exactly, particularly the comment about the loss of community.

regards
David Cameron
  #19 (permalink)  
Old June 4th, 2003, 12:38 AM
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I just want to agree with all the other posters: I want the MAIL-list back! This new stuff just isnt working for me... :(
  #20 (permalink)  
Old June 4th, 2003, 04:05 AM
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I've nothing really new to add to the eloquent points that Hal, David, Jeff & others have put forward here but felt that I ought to at least add to the show of strength and make the numbers felt.

In my opinion the use of mailing lists and e-mail replies WAS what made p2p.wrox. I fear that this new forum system will just take its place alongside many other desolate and un-used discussion forums. I never had any problems with spam, user-impersonation or "Out of Office" storms and the issue of concealing people's e-mail adresses surely can't be that difficult.

Regards,
James





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