Mailinglist, Archive and such stuff

Hi All.

I did some research to find out more about this mailinglist as it
badgered me what all the hype is about.

As far as I could find this list has been moved from phpgroups.com some
years ago to php.net to have a better support also from the technical
side. At least that was what I read from Ben Ramseys first post to this
list[1]. So the list itself came to existence without official
"sponsoring" whatsoever. There is also no listing of this mailinglist on
the official Mailinglist-page of php.net[2], and as the list itself is
prefixed "ug" and not "php" on the news-server[3] I find it problematic
to think of the ug-admins-list as an official mailinglist of the
PHP-Project. For me it's a list that is thankfully hosted on php.net and
more thankfully with a php.net list-address but that's about it.

Regarding the privacy of the list, I couldn't find a search that
included the ug-admins-list. But I might not have lookerd hard enough,
so if yomeone can correct me there, I'm fine.

In my eyes there are only two points where the content of the list is
exposed to the public:

1. The list-archive at http://news.php.net/ug.admins and
2. the nntp-interface at news://news.php.net

Both rely on the nntp-protocol, as the web-interface is nothing but a
http-interface to the underlying news-server. And as far as I know there
is a possibility to use nntp with authentication so it could be
implemented to allow access to that list (or any other list) only to
known users. But I do not know whether that is wanted on the side of
PHP.net.

A better searchability of the mailinglists has more than once been
discussed as far as I know but there has never been an improvement. But
I'm not sure whether no one improved it or the improvement hasn't been
added to the website. Currently some of the mailinglists are searchable
via a google-search. But that doesn't work for all of them.

Why all that?

For me a certain amount of privacy on the ug-admins-Mailinglist should
be possible. There are discussions like the one Beth started about how
to deal with certain members but there are also discount-codes for
usergroups that should not go out to the public. Currently they only go
out to the public when someone diggs through the news-list on
http://news.php.net. I'd call that "security by obscurity" but for me
that's good enough. As currently the list is not searchable.

So if we want to enable searching on this mailinglist (and that was what
started the whole discussion as far as I remember) we will have to think
about how to be able to hide this search from "the general public" - If
we want to do that at all

So for me the privacy-question has been solved and is sufficient at the
current setup but the searchability could need some improvement. And
there is for me the question, can we improve the searchability of all
those PHP-mailinglists by improving it for the UG-Admins-list? And is
that something the PHP.net-project is willing to support?

My 2 cent I wanted to share with you.

Cheers

Andreas

[1] http://news.php.net/ug.admins/2
[2] http://php.net/mailing-lists.php
[3] http://news.php.net
-- 
                                                              ,,,
                                                             (o o)
+---------------------------------------------------------ooO-(_)-Ooo-+
| Andreas Heigl                                                       |
| mailto:[email protected]                  N 50°22'59.5" E 08°23'58" |
| http://andreas.heigl.org                       http://hei.gl/wiFKy7 |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
| http://hei.gl/root-ca                                               |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+