[Mailman-Users] How to actively read the list online?

Lucio Chiappetti lucio at lambrate.inaf.it
Tue Jul 12 04:26:42 EDT 2016


On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> The problem is that a typical web forum these days is not a static page, 
> it's a web app that is self-refreshing.  So as a forumn user, you have a 
> window or tab opened on the forum, you go to bed, and in the morning the 
> page is 11 posts longer than when you left.

I see.
Not sure how "typical" such behaviour is.
Personally (coming from Usenet, and used to read Usenet forums, i.e. 
newsgroups, via a MAIL client) I sort-of hate forums, or at least the 
"maze of little forums all different". I can stand only PhpBB operated 
forums, and these are NOT auto-refreshing (or at least they aren't in the 
way I use them ... I do keep the forum permanently logged on, but I press 
a "new posts" button to refresh the page when I WANT to see if there are 
new messages ... since threads are archived in reverse chronological 
order, most recent first, I have to take note of the time of the most 
recent message before clicking to see whether there is anything new or 
not after clicked.

In my opinion a forum is little more than a chat, and I do not care about 
it being archived forever (although de facto PhpBB forums do it, Usenet 
feeds expired after a while), while a mailing list archive is something 
for serious work. In this case a reference to a PRECISE url for that 
message on that date of that month is mandatory.

Anyhow, getting a self-refreshing html page is just a matter of adding a
<meta http-equiv=refresh content=nnn> tag to the <head>

Not sure if there is an easy provision to customize the mailman archive 
pages with such a tag

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Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
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