Our mailing lists and forums are integrated and synchronized. When you post on the forums, a corresponding email is sent to the list. When you send to the list, a corresponding post is made on the the forums. In theory, this means that you can use whichever you like best, but still communicate with everyone.
However, it isn’t quite so simple in practice. There are a variety of technical challenges involved in integrating two systems which were never supposed to be integrated. For example, when you send an email to a list, the system has to figure out which discussion thread on the forum to which you’re replying. This is accomplished by examining information in the email’s header, which isn’t always dependable.
We won’t go into the nitty gritty details, mainly because we really don’t want to. We’re definitely going to implement a better system in the future, but for now we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got.
Here are the things you need to know to survive in this strange, alien setup we’ve created.
If you’re using the forums:
- Keep in mind that whatever you say can’t be taken back. You may be able to edit the forum post, or delete it, but you can’t edit or delete the email now sitting in people’s inboxes.
- You’re going to see a lot of quotes and email signatures. This is because most email clients automatically quote the entire message a person is replying to, and most people don’t delete the quotes. The system doesn’t have any way to distinguish between what is an intentional quote and what is automatically added, and so all is kept, just in case.
If you’re using the mailing lists:
- Please delete the message quotes your client automatically generates. Our forum system has no way to figure out which quotes are intentional and which aren’t, and it really clutters things up for forum users. Quote responsibly and succinctly!
- Please use the reply function of your client to reply to a post, and not the forward function. The system relies heavily on the information this adds to your email’s header to figure out where to put your post on the forums.
- When creating a new message, you don’t need to add the [ArchReactor] or [ArchChat] prefixes to the subject line; the system handles that automatically.