[Haskell] Re: Haskell web forum

[Jeremy Shaw]

Christian Neumann <christian <at> altfrau.de> writes:

> 
> Am Thu, 21 Sep 2006 08:07:36 +0100
> schrieb "David House" <dmhouse <at> gmail.com>:

> As a real Haskell newbie I must say that this is (IMHO) a very bad idea.
> It's annoying to register on yet another forum just to ask one question
> (and even more to regularly use it). 

> Maybe it would be nice to have a "WebToList-Gateway": you can post your
> question with a form on some webpage and it gets delivered to the list.

This sounds an awful lot like gmane. gmane takes the existing mailing lists and 
adds:

 + nntp access
 + archive searching
 + 2 different web interfaces (one email-like, one blog-like)
 + rss feeds
 + web based posting gateway

As a matter of fact, I am posting this message via the gmane web interface, 
just to see how easy or hard it actually is.

This list can be viewed at:

http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general

A bunch more haskell lists can be found at:

http://gmane.org/find.php?list=haskell

Perhaps instead of a web forum we simply need to:

 a) make the gmane interface better known
 b) figure out why gmane is not as good as 'real' web forum, and fix it.

It seems that doing a one-off posting to this list via gmane is going to be 
very easy -- even easier than signing up for a forum, and remembering/saving a 
password. I believe the steps are:

 (1) click on reply
 (2) enter my name, email, and message
 (3) hit submit
 (4) receive an email which I reply to to confirm I really exist.

In my opinion, the current solution is pretty spiffy since you can pick your 
favorite access method (email, nntp, web), and still reach everyone via their 
favorite access method.

j.