Imported from previous forum
Hello All,
While I’m a bit of a lurker I find the Discussion group software somewhat limited for sending out and answering to messages generated about FIX.
- You have to a message vía the web.
- The From: part of the message is always the list address and not the real sender’s address: this appears at the bottom.
- You have to reply also vía the web interface
Would people be interested in using mailing list software intended for mailing list which would not have the limits indicated? I would be willing to provide this "service" probably using majordomo or similar software.
This may make the interchange on information a little more fluid than it is at the moment.
Regards,
Simon Mudd
Hi Simon,
I for one would very much like a better interface than the current one. Another problem, in addition to the ones that you mentioned, is that it’s not easy to search the archive to see if someone has already answered your question.
I think moving to a proper mailing list would be a good idea but creating a newsgroup might be even better, providing the archive searching automatically (via google). The only problem would be spam which might require that the newsgroup be moderated. I’d be happy to volunteer for the job.
Cheers,
David.
— Original message —
> Hello All,
>
> While I’m a bit of a lurker I find the Discussion group software somewhat limited for sending out and answering to messages generated about FIX.
>
> 1. You have to a message vía the web.
> 2. The From: part of the message is always the list address and not the real sender’s address: this appears at the bottom.
> 3. You have to reply also vía the web interface
>
> Would people be interested in using mailing list software intended for mailing list which would not have the limits indicated? I would be willing to provide this “service” probably using majordomo or similar software.
>
> This may make the interchange on information a little more fluid than it is at the moment.
>
> Regards,
>
> Simon Mudd
Hello David,
OK, Well I’ve setup a majordomo based mailing list for this purpose.
To subscribe send a message to <majordomo@WL0.org> with the text subscribe in the BODY of the message. You’ll receive back a message asking for confirmation of the subscription which you need to acknowledge.
The mailing list address is <fix@WL0.org> but I’d suggest not posting for a few days to allow people to have time to see this message and to subscribe to the list.
I’ll make the list accessible from the Web (not for posting though) from the following location:
http://www.WL0.org/cgi-bin/wilma/fix
Search facilities provided to search the contents of the mailing list.
> I think moving to a proper mailing list would be a good idea [snip]. The only problem would be spam which might require that the newsgroup be moderated. I’d be happy to volunteer for the job.
Because of this I’ve made it a mailing list and not a public newsgroup. The list will also only be open to subscribers though I can manually approve messages sent by non-suscribers.
I hope that a few others will join to and that the list will be more active than these "discussion forums" which are pretty quiet.
Regards,
Simon
Just to correct a small mistake:
[snip]
> To subscribe send a message to <majordomo@WL0.org> with the text subscribe in the BODY of the message. You’ll receive back a message asking for confirmation of the subscription which you need to acknowledge.
[snip]
This should have read:
To subscribe send a message to <majordomo@WL0.org> with the text "subscribe fix" (without quotes) in the body of the message.
Sorry for confusing the issue.
Simon
One final comment:
Please ensure that any messages sent to either the subscription account <majordomo@WL0.org> or to the fix mailing list <fix@WL0.org> are NOT sent in HTML format, but in plain text.
The software which processes the subscription messages can get rather confused and often you just make the messages larger than necessary.
Thanks,
Simon
I agree with John (and others who have contacted me directly) that we should avoid fragmenting the discussion groups and that we should improve the current facility.
Peter White and I are responsible for the FIX website and we have quite a few pending website enhancement “to-do” items with regards to the Discussion boards. Unfortunately we haven’t had very much in the way of website enhancements the past year, however, we have a new firm handling our web site development tasks and an arrangement by which we have some development every month.
That being said, we have a backlog of dev tasks and expect it will take a bit to get through them. Please note that the General Q&A discussion board itself has close to 3000 email list entries as subscribers.
Some of the Discussion board-related enhancements on our list are:
- Add “reason you’re getting this and how to unsubscribe” link to Discussion post emails as appendage
- Add link to FAQ to Discussion post emails as appendage (note need to rev the FAQ though)
- Improvements to avoid users accidentally posting the same entry multiple times
- Ability to search Discussion groups by keywords (selective by discussion group)
- Ability to control sort order of Discussion group postings
We’re certainly interested in capturing other suggestions. (Send them directly to Peter and I vs. cluttering the Discussion board please).
> I have previously requested a mechanism so that the FIX discussion groups could be searched. I believe that the current facilities for FIX discussion groups can be improved upon.
>
> All that said, I think that the idea to just start up a competing discussion group mechanism without significant buy-in from the FIX community is counter-productive.
>
> The desire to improve things, including our discussion groups, is healthy. Fragmentation of our discussions across competing electronic mechanisms is not.
>
> One discussion group mechanism please. Improve it if possible.
>
> Thanks for listening.
>
> John Prewett
>
> I have previously requested a mechanism so that the FIX discussion groups could be searched. I believe that the current facilities for FIX discussion groups can be improved upon.
OK
> All that said, I think that the idea to just start up a competing discussion group mechanism without significant buy-in from the FIX community is counter-productive.
That may well be true, and I’m not really trying to compete. However the web pages appear to be not ideally suited really to a proper and active mailing list type discussions. It took me a couple of minutes to start up my web brower, go to the web page and reply to this message, when a simply “reply” by email would have been much quicker.
> The desire to improve things, including our discussion groups, is healthy. Fragmentation of our discussions across competing electronic mechanisms is not.
Fair comment, but who do we have to talk to about this?
> One discussion group mechanism please. Improve it if possible.
Let’s hope that someone who manages this site can take a look at this, because while the current setup is quite “pretty” it does seem to lack quite a bit of functionality.
Simon Mudd
Hi John,
I agree in general. I think the big problem with the current discussion mechanism is that it’s more of a hinderance than a help in promoting discussion. I’m not sure it can be fixed in the current format without a major overhaul.
Cheers, David.
> I have previously requested a mechanism so that the FIX discussion groups could be searched. I believe that the current facilities for FIX discussion groups can be improved upon.
>
> All that said, I think that the idea to just start up a competing discussion group mechanism without significant buy-in from the FIX community is counter-productive.
>
> The desire to improve things, including our discussion groups, is healthy. Fragmentation of our discussions across competing electronic mechanisms is not.
>
> One discussion group mechanism please. Improve it if possible.
>
> Thanks for listening.
>
> John Prewett
>
On 11/03/2002 you wrote:
> I agree in general. I think the big problem with the current discussion mechanism is that it’s more of a hinderance than a help in promoting discussion. I’m not sure it can be fixed in the current format without a major overhaul.
To fix things, apart from the “search engine” doesn’t really require more than:
- Make the email messages show who actually posts the messages
- currently it shows the same From: line <updates@fixprotocol.org>.
- on most mailing lists people value the comments of some people over others and seeing directly who has written the message is much better than the current situation where the information is tagged on at the end.
-
Being able to reply to the original messages by email would also help enormously. I’ve replied to updates@fixprotocol.org on more than one occasion: I’ve no idea if anyone read the message or not, but it certainly didn’t get back to the “group’s” subscribers.
-
It would probably be a good thing if the web software showed the messages in a different order to that done currently:
- in inverse cronological order, newest first
- by month/year
-
As commented elsewhere search facilities would help too.
-
I mentioned these problems a few days ago and to those messages got no feedback. When I announce that I’d setup an alternative list (which didn’t take more than an hour to setup) I get calls for “don’t do this please”.
If the solutions are going to take weeks or months I’d rather go ahead with a solution to the problems stated above until they are solved.
I’m sure others will understand that my motives are none other to make these discussion groups work. With 3000 members on the list the traffic is unexpectedly sluggish, and maybe for a reason.
Simon