Email Lists

[kwaka]

I have to add my point of view as well.
I have used the many email lists that wrox provided and have found them to be quite unique, and as such I stuck with them, despite moving on from forum to forum.
I also liked the ability to simply post or reply via email.
I'd also like to say that I never experienced any problems such as spam with the previous system.

[Hal Levy]

James,

As I said, I am not familiar with Lyris. I do know I never saw stability problems or knew of any issues with it. The front end sucked, no doubt. I would have kept the mailing lists in place and re-designed the front end to work with Lyris. Implementing SNITZ created more work for you.

In fact, Implementing SNITZ is going to be more work still. If you add inbound email functionality you will need to create mailboxes.. make a "polling" system to pick up that mail. Route it properly. You have to create the complete mailing list functionality.

You also need to completely change the emails that are sent. it should be[LISTNAME] Subject

None of this "reply to a posting".. who cares if it's a reply or a new message? I just want to see what list it was on and what it's about. Your generic email Subjects do NOTHING to help me sort my messages.

I noticed there is now a link in the emails to say "Clik here to reply". An improvement- but not good enough.

Seems to me it would be MUCH easier to design a new web interface for Lyris.

If you bring back Lyris TODAY- we can get the community working together again. You can use the web pages as they stood and reboot every day until such time as they are rewritten.

Doing that will give the community a chance to recover from this debacle AND help in the re-development of the P2P front end. You know.. Programmer to Programmer.... The whole basis of the P2P lists and why they were such a success.

Bring back Lyris and re-develop the front end. It's less work than implementing email list functionality into the forums.

Hal

Hal Levy
Daddyshome, LLC

[Hal Levy]

quote:Originally posted by Kabe
 Maybe also possible to invert the fora topic list ?

Last message on first please ...

This is a perfect example of where email is better... I *DESPISE* last message first organization... I think it's counterintuitive to read a thread backwards. But some people like it.... EMail lets us sort the way we want.


Hal Levy
Daddyshome, LLC

[Hal Levy]

Another problem- I want to change my "user name" i didn't know that the user name I picked would be used to identify me to the public.. I see no way to change hlevy to Hal Levy... which is what I would want it to be.

Can this be changed by administration or do I need to make a new account?


Hal Levy
Daddyshome, LLC


EDIT: Thanks to the adminstrators for making this change..

[toma]

I have to disagree that the p2p site had no direct revenue. I purchased several Wrox books because I knew there was an EMAIL discussion list I could turn to for help. I do not have the time or interest in using a web based forum. The excusses of spam and instability are just that. Those problems simply did not exist in any fasion that affected the operation of the email list. Obviously Wiley has screwed up here by not involving the community in any of this but is not ready to admit it.


[quote]quote:Originally posted by 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:

Originally posted by JSample
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.

[David Long]

quote:Originally posted by toma
 I have to disagree that the p2p site had no direct revenue. I purchased several Wrox books because I knew there was an EMAIL discussion list I could turn to for help.

That's indirect revenue - you might have bought the book because of the forum, but Wrox's finance team didn't know that; as far as they were concerned, it was just another book sale. The site itself had no way of collecting money directly from its users (we couldn't really ask people to pay to use the lists), and as such we were told to concentrate on working on sites that did make money on their own - the Today sites, Wroxbase and Wroxdirect. If only P2P had had as much time and effort put into it as the Today sites did, but we can only imagine what it could have been like - internally, there were so many good ideas floating around that were never implemented...

[toma]

The email notices that are being sent out are full of HTML tags. It makes them really hard to read. I've had more trouble trying to work these stupid forums than I had in over a year of using the old p2p email system combined.

This has been a horrible first impression of Wiley.

[JSample]

Toma:

What you are seeing are the Forum code tags which appear when someone uses the quick reply button and it inserts the previous person posting in a quote.

I will check into having forum code stripped from teh subcription email before they are sent.

Thank you,
James Sample

[Greg Griffiths]

As many of the others have said, bring back the email approach. As far as I can recall - and I subscribed to most to lists - there was very few <1% SPAM, only a few out of office posts and never any spoofing.

One of the other advantages is that as I work remotely most of the time and travel with work - Lead Developer for US Corporate - Having them all as email on my laptop is much easier than having to log onto a website.

Once downloaded I could reply to those I was interested in without having to spend hours trawling through all the posts to find the interesting ones - like I have to do on UseNet !!!

As many of us are UK based on dialup still, a one shot email download is much cheaper than spending an hour or so trawling a website.

The new approach generally forces us to come to Wiley/P2P for content and posting, which as many have already said is a BIG turnoff, probably one of the main issues with UseNet is the same ?

Its not that difficult to do really, some commercial tools - such as OpenText's Livelink use eLink/discussions - to achieve both a web and email interface to a discussion. And I suppose that if you bite the bullet and ask then the "Community" may even be of a mind to assist you in developing the required code for this as we want it so badly ??!!

In short, we would REALLY like to be able to do the following :

1. Get all the posts by email with no flavour text and the complete text with no summary or cut off after n Characters.

2. The ability to reply to a post via a mail client directly to the server - which you can also display on the web view if you want to.

3. Anything I've missed that others have covered already

[enzo]

P2P really wrox!!!!!............before:D

enzo c",)