For a while now folks I know have been talking about how to reoutfit Mailman so it has a proper web front-end. The idea would be to provide additional features, make open source mailing lists friendly to web forum loving people, and keep hardcore email-only contributors able to participate in the same medium as free-wheeling web forum afficionados.
MáirÃn put up a series of posts that not only give great visual thoughts, but are some powerfully good ideas on providing something a community can really gain from using. I’m not going to try summarizing, I just encourage you to read at least these two:
… and go ahead and read 7,750 pixels of mailing list thread, which came first anyway.
One thing that really struck me about these ideas is that many of the features that rely upon posting history can be run against an existing archive of messages. That means upgrading Mailman to features like these means quickly gaining a view in to the history of your mailing list that is a sizeable part of the richness of the new features. All the ideas that rely upon keywords in posts, previous posting history and frequency and topics covered, all the reputation ideas, all that would be seeded with as many months or years of archives a mailing list has. That’s really cool!
I really look forward to seeing some of these kind of changes in Mailman. I’m a big fan of Mailman on the straight mailing list management side. But over the years I’ve seen the wider and wider divide between the users who prefer web forums and those who prefer mailing lists (many of whom are contributors who want to interact with other users, but not on a web forum.) These ideas could provide a great stitching of that divide, without forcing a big change on either party.
Do you know if someone is currently working on implementing these ideas?
Yes, there is a Google Summer of Code project starting, and I’ve seen committed work coming from the Fedora Engineering team.
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2012/syst3mw0rm/31001
the question is, how many of those features would be usable from inside the mail client? i.e. not force you to use the web interface to get equivelant functinality with the other users. and if most of the users will (hopefully) keep using the mail client as their mailing list interface, then many of those facebook-like features will simply have to little data to be useful.
The project is indeed very interesting. We already have a start of an archiver and we are working closely with the mailman guys to have something coherent with their idea.
The basic idea is to get an archiver running and add on the top of it the forum-like feature.
Maybe Nicu is right and adding the facebook-like feature (like/dislike) are of no use.
But I do think, tags and keywords are interesting even if only few people set them.
Anyway, the idea is to not change at all the current usage of mailing list but adding a new interface (web-based) to them.
This would also allow for example to just send an email to a list without registering to it and still be able to participate to the discussion.
As someone who manages several mailman instances, I think this rocks. It reminds me of the mlstats project from a few years back.
One notable still-missing feature, unless I missed it, is the ability to track users in history – to find out how many users there were on an arbitrary date two years ago, for example, or to find out when a given user subscribed to the list. The List Monthly Health item is closest to this (and a great idea), but I’d also like just a list of users, maybe on a monthly schedule, or maybe just record subscribes & unsubs. Yes, I know – scratch the itch & submit upstream! on my to-do list.
I do love the idea of the “High School Yearbook”. I wonder if the reverse could also happen – Most Well-Hidden Lurker?
All in all a very worthwhile effort.