Email Lists

[chrislepingwell]

Just adding my voice to the general feeling of loss and discontent here. I liked the old email system, it gave me a sense of community (mainly because no-one else ever sends me emails :) and was a welcome distraction from the boring tasks of changing button fonts for users when we should really be concentrating on getting the code right. As to the topic of WMM (weapons of mass mailing), I never had any problem with spam, until I was deprived of this old p2p forums, and went to join a web-based substitute.
The thing about the emails was that, as has already been mentioned, they turn up, you read them, and if you think you know the answer, send a reply. For the most part, we are all working programmers with jobs to do and software to write; going to this new web-forum is actually a major distraction from our day-to-day business.
I think that the mailing lists worked well because they were _mailing_ lists: they didn't need effort on our part, it was 'push' technology, not 'pull'. We don't actually want to go looking for questions to answer, but we are more than happy to help if one of our community asks for our help.
Please don't confuse the old p2p system with the sort of discussion forums on slashdot, or linux HOWTOs. We're not interested in these clever little icons, or HTML infested email. We're not out to become 'Forum Ancients'. We dont even want to be able to see graphical representations of the threads. We just want to ask a question of our friends, and have someone answer (generally Jeff or Brian in my case :)
Can't you guys just dust off the old mailinglist code, and give us our old place back?

[Kabe]

The mailinglist has realy to come back !!

That was absolutely the power of p2p.wrox.com before.
I haven't the time to check from time to time the fora if anyone replied already on a message of me.

Please, think about it.
Kabe

[JSample]

Hlevy:

I want to respond to your comments about why we didn’t just bring up the old P2P site.

Wrox used a very good software called Lyris List Manager for its discussion lists, and I have been very familiar with it for a couple of years now. The problem is that their implementation of Lyris was very unstable (requiring daily reboots) and we were given a corrupt and unusable database which is why we were unable to repost the messages from April and May with the rest of the archive.

As I stated in my earlier post all of your comments have been heard and I will be meeting with others today to discuss the addition of a reply through email feature to this site. I cannot however suggest that we re-develop the old P2P system as it was corrupt and unstable. I can say that if the decision is made to add this feature it will take some time to implement so please be patient as we value your support in this new endeavor.

We really do care a great deal about this community and want to make it a wonderful experience for all users.

Thank you,
James Sample
Director, IS-Infrastructure
Wiley Publishing, Inc.

[Kabe]

Maybe also possible to invert the fora topic list ?

Last message on first please ...

[Jeff Mason]

quote:Originally posted by JSample
 Hlevy:

I want to respond to your comments about why we didn’t just bring up the old P2P site.

Wrox used a very good software called Lyris List Manager for its discussion lists, and I have been very familiar with it for a couple of years now. The problem is that their implementation of Lyris was very unstable (requiring daily reboots) and we were given a corrupt and unusable database which is why we were unable to repost the messages from April and May with the rest of the archive.

As I stated in my earlier post all of your comments have been heard and I will be meeting with others today to discuss the addition of a reply through email feature to this site. I cannot however suggest that we re-develop the old P2P system as it was corrupt and unstable. I can say that if the decision is made to add this feature it will take some time to implement so please be patient as we value your support in this new endeavor.

We really do care a great deal about this community and want to make it a wonderful experience for all users.

Thank you,
James Sample
Director, IS-Infrastructure
Wiley Publishing, Inc.

No system is perfect. I'm surprised that the Lyris system implementation you inherited was so unstable. The Lyris List Manager has been around for probably ten years or more so I find it hard to believe it is as inherently unstable as you imply. Who knows what WROX did to it, though.

Note that even if it was unstable, we email users never noticed a reboot. If that happened, we just didn't get email for a few minutes or so. I guarantee that users will notice a reboot if your web server forum software goes down. It's that active versus passive involvement others have talked about.

You keep talking about a "reply through email" feature. I'm not sure what that is, but what we're asking for is in fact an email discussion list, and not some sort of email interface to your web forum.

For all its implementation warts, the email list was a vibrant and involved community. So far, I see no evidence of that here - we have one active "meta-topic" on this site about your implementation of the P2P community (without involving the community in your decisions until they were a fait accompli), but virtually nothing in the real meat and potatoes - the subject discussion forums. I hope that is simply the result of the startup - that it will take time to get people posting again.

I hope that's all it is, and that this site doesn't fall victim to that which befalls many such endeavors - style over substance, and form over function.

Jeff Mason
Custom Apps, Inc.
www.custom-apps.com

[Knik DerMuf]

I totally agree this really sucks. Give us back our e-mail... Please :(

Knik DerMuf

[David Long]

I don't know if anyone here remembers me, but I was one of the original team behind P2P at Wrox (before the liquidation and subsequent takeover by Wiley). I certainly recognise some names including David Cameron and Hal Levy from the old P2P site, though. Please note that I'm now just a user of these forums like the rest of you, I have nothing to do with the Wrox name in a business capacity any more.

I've been following this thread with interest, I agree with everything the original P2P members have said, but haven't felt the need to reply until I read this:

quote:Originally posted by JSample
 Wrox used a very good software called Lyris List Manager for its discussion lists, and I have been very familiar with it for a couple of years now. The problem is that their implementation of Lyris was very unstable (requiring daily reboots) and we were given a corrupt and unusable database which is why we were unable to repost the messages from April and May with the rest of the archive.

I'd be intrigued to hear more about these "daily reboots". The box that used to run the Lyris List Manager software was pretty much stable in my opinion; we frequently used to achieve uptimes in excess of 100 days and although it might have crashed occasionally, that was down to the fault of the software (confirmed by Lyris themselves) and not Wrox's implementation of it. I don't recall PostgreSQL (the database behind Lyris List Manager) ever crashing or corrupting data on us.

Having said that, the front-end web server was indeed unstable and required frequent rebooting (maybe once every couple of weeks; nowhere near daily). This was due to the site's popularity and the fact that the code behind it did not scale and was never designed to handle the number of users that were eventually hitting the site. The version of the P2P website that everyone here was familiar with had been running the same codebase for over two years, and desperately needed a rewrite in order to cope with the ten-fold increase in traffic the site had experienced during those two years. Unfortunately, due to internal pressures, work on revamping P2P was never sanctioned - the site was actually a loss-leader for Wrox, costing us time and bandwidth but producing no direct revenue.

However, the flakiness of the front end webserver should have nothing to do with corrupting the Lyris List Manager database. Before I was made redundant by Wrox, I know for a fact that daily backup tapes were made of the database and as such all the original data should be recoverable from these, if not from the hard disks of the Lyris box itself. It seems from the way the archive is constructed that the only data Wiley have access to is the hard disk of the webserver box; the archive pages look suspiciously like the original archive pages from the old site, with a search-and-replace run over them to change the header, sidebar and footer. I offered my services to Wiley (via one of the ex-Wrox system administrators) if they required assistance with P2P or any of Wrox's other sites, but I was never contacted.

Finally, I do have to say that from my point of view as one of the faces behind P2P, the email facilities provided by the site were used and appreciated far more than the web front end. As has already been said in this thread, email is far more convenient for working programmers and I can testify that while I was at Wrox we received numerous emails praising us for the fact that programmers could communicate with each other via email and not have to go out of their way to visit a web-based forum to do so, unlike so many other programming sites.

[JSample]

Jeff:

Please explain why an email posting method to this website is different than a discussion list. If you receive a post in your email and can reply to that post by replying to the email (never coming to this site), how is this different that what everyone in this thread has been asking for?

If there is some piece that you are asking for that I am missing please let me know so i can take it with me to my meeting today.

David:

I am sorry I did not go into the detail that you did in explaining but the fact is that the web front end did need rebooting 4 times in the 5 days while we were doing the initial evaluation of the sites. We can only work with the data that we were provided from Wrox and the Postgres database was indeed very corrupt with Bad date formats and absolutely no indexes. While the corruption may have been fixable given enough time, with the web front end instabilities it was decided to scrap the old system as start fresh.

And so far the only complaint we have had is that unlike a discussion list you cannot post or reply to these forums by using your email client instead of visiting this site. As I have stated earlier I will be discussing adding this feature. As to the old system Lyris is a great product that we have been using for 2 years and I even have a testimonial for them on their website, but this does not fix the fact that for P2P to be truly accessible for everyone a web front end that does not crash is absolutely vital.

Thank you,
James

[edukoski]

Why don't create list in spanish languaje with several toppics?

Regards, Eduardo from Uruguay

Eduardo B.
Montevideo
Uruguay

[Jeff Mason]

quote:Originally posted by JSample
 Jeff:

Please explain why an email posting method to this website is different than a discussion list. If you receive a post in your email and can reply to that post by replying to the email (never coming to this site), how is this different that what everyone in this thread has been asking for?

If there is some piece that you are asking for that I am missing please let me know so i can take it with me to my meeting today.

I'm not sure it is different. I simply did not know what you meant by "reply through email". If I can get, through email:

1. All responses, replies, and new threads posted to a forum I have registered interest in by subscribing, and,

2. That I can reply to a thread or initiate a new one via email, and,

3. That the subject of the email contains just the forum name and thread topic (so I can filter and distribute messages appropriately to email folders), then

4. I'm happy.

It's not that I don't want to visit your site (I do!), it's just that I don't want to do that every time I want to participate in a topic discussion.

Jeff Mason
Custom Apps, Inc.
www.custom-apps.com