Aral Balkan

I recently tried to sign up for the Tartan mailing list but gave up in utter frustration after putting up with screen after screen of ads, etc. because it is hosted by a mailing list service called Topica (not linking to them in order not to boost their pagerank.)

Paul Kenney, if you're reading this, you have a shiny new, ad-free mailing list waiting for you for Tartan on OSFlash if you want it.

This got me thinking that it would be great to move the FlexCoders list over to OSFlash as well. It is currently hosted on Yahoo's "free" services which are not so free (they serve ads on the list and you also need to register with Yahoo in order to sign up.) Also, the search feature on their archives is crippled (it searches only a subset of messages at a time), making it unusable on such a large, busy and important list. A mailing list on OSFlash would be free of Yahoo ads and would not require a Yahoo account to access. Even more importantly, it would have full search on archives.

Steven, Ali, if you guys want an ad-free mailing list, just send me an email and it'll be set up in no time :)

Comments

• You don't have to register with Yahoo, you can merely send an email to the subscribe address... but it's impossible to know, there are no plain to see instructions that describe this process, and I don't think Yahoo wants you to do that anyway.
  
  It'd be nice to have a search built in! Here's my vote they move, Aral.

  by JesterXL on 2005-08-31 14:13:18

• Aral ... the list is working fine for the thousands of folks that use it; the adverts are easy to ignore, most people agree that they can simply receive the email into their inbox (just send email to flexcoders-subscribe@yahoogroups.com) and then the implementation technology for the mailing list is irrelevant.
  
  We could easily host our own bespoke mailing list server similar to osflash, but the functionality offered by yahoogroups delivers on what the majority want of the list.
  
  Thanks for the offer though.

  by Steven Webster on 2005-08-31 22:56:14

• By the way Aral, the google ads on your blog are really frustrating. If you want us to host your blog over at www.iterationtwo.com, just give us a shout and there's an ad-free blog waiting for you over there :) :) :) :)

  by Steven Webster on 2005-08-31 22:57:33

• Sorry for the blog spam; also just to address your point of searching the archives. This is covered in the flexcoders FAQ ... there is a fully searchable archive for flexcoders, which is listed in the footer of every email posted to the list. And for the avoidance of doubt, you don't need to have a yahoogroups account to use the list -- you can subscribe to receive the emails without your own yahoogroups account, or you can go and read messages in the archives or on yahoo, without having a subscription. You only need a yahoogroups account to use the other features of yahoogroups.
  
  For the majority, the use-case of the flexcoders mailing list, is using it as an email-list, not a web-based forum.

  by Steven Webster on 2005-08-31 23:00:38

• Hey Steven, for me to offer, for you to turn down :)
  
  Regarding the search function: It is severely crippled. Eg. I just searched for "webster" and, after over a minute of waiting I got a partial list of results. It searched 848 messages out of 20817. To make it *search* for more, you need to click "Search more".
  
  To search the whole archive for a search term would take 25 clicks. At a 30 second wait time for results, that would take roughly 12.5 minutes for one search.
  
  I'm not sure if this is covered in the Flashcoders FAQ or not but it's definitely not usable :)
  
  It'll be cool if you could host your own mailing list as Flexcoders is a great resource and it's a shame that the current archives are not searchable in a usable manner. I hope you will be able to recover the messages from the Yahoo archives and import them into the new list as there's a wealth of information in there being drip-fed to us by Yahoo.

  by aral on 2005-09-01 00:35:49

• Hi Jesse,
  
  Doesn't look like it's going to happen but Steven did mention that they could host the list on their own servers which would definitely fix the problem with the ads and the crippled search functionality.

  by aral on 2005-09-01 00:39:10

• Aral -- from the footer of every email that has gone to flexcoders:
  
  
  Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com
  
  A search for webster took under a second and returned all hits. The list (Manish) provided web-archive search facility for those that require it. We don't like Yahoo! search either, but the operation offered as a listserv is simple and it works. We've no intention of hosting our own list server right now - we could - but we're happy that YahooGroups provides the level of services that the list members need. Flexcoders is delivering significant value to those working with Flex, and we've no need to change it. And Flex isn't Flash. Or open-source. :-)

  by Steven Webster on 2005-09-01 09:19:38

• Oh cool -- who reads footers anyways? Thanks Manish :) Neat -- I take it back: Searchable search, woohoo.
  
  Btw, re: the Google ads on the site -- thanks for reminding me about them. They're going to get the axe ASAP. I just checked and we've made an amazing $84 in a year or something (and they haven't even sent that over) :)
  
  You're right that Flex isn't open source, but Flexcoders is :) Oh yeah, and Flex is Flash -- don't forget what you compile down to! :) Go Flash Platform!

  by aral on 2005-09-01 09:37:01