On Thu, 2 Aug 2018 21:26:46 -0400, Noah Davis <noahadvs@gmail.com> wrote:
Here are my problems with https://lists.opensuse.org :
Search: https://i.imgur.com/i3E1YAj.png
• Why the whole width? As you mention it, I assume you do not like it. I do. Layout is a personal preference, and I have written proxy filters in the past that remove "width" attributes from html or css to make sections use the whole visible area. (or replace "860px" with "100%") I hate needless whitespace, but even in that sentence, "needless" is subjective. *I* like to have as much possible information in the available display area. I hate it when web-makers decide for me that their page looks better with 15 cm of blank on both sides of the text. User preferences.
Viewing a thread: https://i.imgur.com/zpnGrP6.png
Yes, room for improvement there.
List of threads: https://i.imgur.com/DbiFtTL.png
There are still people who do not know how to use a mailing list, or even how to use mail in the first place. I bet there are even people using mail clients that put the wrong In-Reply-To: or References: headers in the reply. You cannot blame the list for those posts disrupting the flow of the threads. Then there are time-based filters. If you have a thread that spans several weeks/months, and your filter shows only a part of given thread, you will end up with several "top-nodes" in the view. Any other approach would be wrong.
It's a lot easier to follow threads when viewing them on https://lists.fedoraproject.org because of the layout:
Yes and no. This has no option to collapse a thread you are mot interested in. I understand that you like it better than the alternative, but using your own mail client on a local archive (or whatever (local) tool you have installed to browse is will immediately solve your issues. Again, it is all about user preferences. Where one sees overview, the other can see bloat. What one perceives as easy to read, someone else will experience that fatiguing and a strain to the eyes. The archives are public. If you download them, store them on your local server, set up all 17 different UI's you prefer over what you complain about and make it public for the list users to visit/view, and collect all the feedback, *then* you might find an approach that will serve the majority better that what currently makes most/many people happy. Just complaining about what is freely available won't change a thing. Ever. This is freetime work. Nobody is willing to set up something completely new if they won't use it themselves. Again, I am under the opinion that most members of this list are open to change, but it should bring improvements and not just a new/cool shiny/bloated javascript-enabled web-face that adds no value for those readers. This means that *if* the public interface to the ML's is to change, it should be very configurable. *very*. So I can set it to use the full width of the available page and you want to see just 4 cm of text. Joe might want sans-serif 12pt justified, where Mary wants serif 9pt green-on-black right-aligned. Should I go on? I don't think so, and I also think that using your own local ML or other tool is *the* solution to solve your grieves. Do you know mairix? -- H.Merijn Brand http://tux.nl Perl Monger http://amsterdam.pm.org/ using perl5.00307 .. 5.29 porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and openSUSE http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http://www.test-smoke.org/ http://qa.perl.org http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/