Complaints about using this list...

[William Lovaton]

Hi Kim,

El mié, 05-01-2005 a las 17:25 -0700, Kim Lux escribió:
> I've got a couple complaints about using this list.  I'm looking for
> suggestions to improve my experience with it.
> 
> a) I can't seem to get searches to find topics that I know are in the
> lists.  I don't have an example off the top of my head, but it would
> save me a ton of time if I could do a good advanced search on these
> archives, something like being able to specify multiple keywords in the
> subject or in the body, that sort of thing.  

I agree with you.  Search capabilities in almost every mailing list
archives are broken.  Not just fedora-list.

What you can do about this is use the power of google to search on the
mail archives.  For instances I can do this:

   <Search Criteria> site:www.redhat.com

This tells google to search _only_ in the site www.redhat.com and most
of the entries are from the mailing list archives and since fedora-list
gets lots of traffic you will be a very lucky person.

This has the additional advantage of being able to search in every
mailing list.  May be the answer to your question lives in another
place.

Some others in this thread had suggested to use you mail client search
capabilities.  That works if you have a database big enough in your hard
drive.  For instance I have 11,500 mails in my fedora-list folder.  If
you want to look for something older, google is the way to go.

> 
> b) I get the list summary, but it isn't convenient to reply to the posts
> like that.  I can't reply on the list website itself and I don't want to
> get the list posts as individual emails because the volume is too high. 
> 
> I find reply to posts from the list summary to be slow because you have
> to manually edit the subject and if you don't get it right you've just
> created a new topic.  I think I wish that this list (and others) were a
> regular usenet newsgroup, but I understand that would have some
> drawbacks too.  

I don't see the reason for using the summary, just get every mail and
filter the traffic in your mail client to an specific folder.  That way
your personal folder won't get cluttered with lots of mails.

I know that the volume is very high but that's the price to pay for a
maturing OS that is getting used by millions of people around the world.
And this is just the beginning, expect things to become worse (This is a
good thing BTW).


> 
> How is everyone else working with this list ?
> 
> I'm beginning to think that I should configure evolution to sort my
> emails into topics and get the whole list as individual posts.  I could
> then search them from within evolution and I could easily reply to
> them. 

I create a filter to tell evolution that it should place the mails from
fedora-list to an specific folder.  Then I just read mails that I am
interested in and reply to the people that I can help.  If I don't know
nothing about the subject I just stay quiet.  Nothing about "Poor man",
"I hope you fix it", "Me too" (unless there is additional info to add),
etc.

And avoid flame wars (if you see one of them).


-William