Should I shut down this list?

[Olly Betts]

This thread seems to be focussing on where to move the discussion
that would happen here to.  I think this is missing my main reason for
suggesting closing this list down, which is that people seem to have
pretty much stopped using it.  If there are list members keen to be
discussing cave surveying, why aren't they discussing cave-surveying
here?  (If it's because they're discussing it elsewhere, then you
already have a defacto replacement.)

On Fri, Sep 29, 2023 at 06:24:00PM +0000, Graham Mullan wrote:
> I quite agree with Andy about Matrix. I've never used it and when it
> was suggested for this all I got was the same list of programs to
> install to run it rather than any clear idea of how to navigate around
> it. Having said that, I suggested Discord - largely on the grounds
> that my wife is an advocate - and it was pointed out that it, too, has
> flaws, though at least you can get in on a web browser without needing
> another program.

FWIW, you can use matrix through a webbrowser much like you can for
discord - that's actually how I use matrix on the desktop:

https://app.element.io/

Discord seems quite a toxic place:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord#Criticisms_and_controversies

Discord is also very much a walled garden.  I got sucked into using it
for a while because one of my clients used it internally (thankfully
they've now stopped).  You could connect to it via a pidgin plugin, but
it was very painful to set up (about 15 minutes of identifying traffic
lights and buses until it grudgingly accepted I wasn't a bot) and
various things randomly broke or never worked properly.  At least matrix
is an open system.

> A further issue with the list - though this applies more to the
> dedicated Survex & Therion lists - is the automatic scrubbing of
> attachments. Yes, we don't want our mailboxes clogged up with these
> but we do want to be able to get to them easily. Plain text emails
> don't help with this.

I can't comment on the Therion list as that's nothing to do with
me, but for the lists.survex.com lists it's because they were
configured back when people worried more about the size of emails, and
persists mostly because the mailmain filtering configuration is rather
baroque and it's never clear to me how the various options interact.
It seems to bite so rarely that I've just not wanted to mess with it.

Cheers,
    Olly