[Cologne-pm] Closed mailing list archives

[A. Pagaltzis]

Hi all,

I am a member of cologne.pm, where the action is currently a tad
slow; so I was looking at the other German groups in an attempt
to find ones which are more lively.

Like ours, most of the websites are comatose (to put it
politely); sometimes they’ve not been updated in five years.
(Ours was last touched two years ago, though we’re working on
that.)

But I know from experience with our group that the mailing list
is a much better indicator of the group’s health than the site
usually is. So rather than looking at the sites at all, I went
straight for the mailing list archives on all of them.

And ran right into a wall in most cases.

Almost everywhere, archives are viewable only by subscribers. Is
that really necessary? I doubt that anything particularly private
is being discussed; but the mailing lists are the only reliable
gauge of a group’s activity level available to external
observers. They’re also the only reliable criterion for how
topical the group’s activities are. Putting them behind a
registration wall amounts to a death knell if the group is
already mostly-dormant.

So here’s my request: please implore the user group leaders to
make their archives publically viewable if at all conceivable.

Regards,
-- 
# Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
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