| HN Mirror

People often say that about mailing lists, but I often wonder if they have used any really good mailing list software. I mean, it's been years, but back in the day we used to write software for dealing with mailing lists and usenet posts and the degree of control you had was so much better than forum software. With forums, you get what your host wants you to see. With mailing lists/usenet you get a feed of data that you can do with as you want. Most modern email clients do a really bad job of dealing with mailing lists. I remember using NN and Gnus for reading mailing lists and maybe my memory has gone foggy, but it was a much better experience than any forum I've ever been on. You've got the ability to search, filter and sort by a variety of criteria. You've got the ability to elect not to read posts by certain people (nor replies to those people). You've got better navigation between threads. You've got the ability to read everything offline. You've got the ability to write code yourself based on the data rather than having to deal with APIs for forums (if you are even lucky enough to be dealing with a forum where your host thinks its OK for you to have APIs at all). You don't have to worry about ads showing up. You don't have to worry about corporate interests deciding what's important for you to see. So many advantages and only a few disadvantages.