Developers of Sympa

[Flemming Bjerke <address@concealed>]

Dear listmembers

I am member of the board of the Danish IT-Political Association, and we
consider for the moment to switch to Sympa. We find Sympa a very fine
and flexible mailinglist system that we indeed appreciate.

However, some of our members prefer mailinglists, and some prefer
forumlike communikation. We have screened the net for open source
solutions, and there are indeed a few ones with this features. However,
most of them have technical ceveats. But, sympa seems to be very well
designed and easy to install (though the installation guidance was a bit
confusing).

So, our premise is that our system must be equally good to use as
maillist and as forum.

Here, we have some problems with the archives of sympa:

1. When you reply from the webinterface, you cannot see the mail you
reply to. We do not see our members really using that reply function.
And indeed you in the help section you write:

> You can also log on to the mailing list environment, go to the
> information page of the list to which you want to send a message and
> click on the 'Post' link in the left menu.
>
> This method is not very flexible: from the mailing list web interface,
> you can not add or change some recipients, add an attachment or format
> the messages you send.

That is, you tend to advice people not to use this feature.

But, we need the opposite: a forumlike feature that is attractive to
use. For us this implies you can read the mail while you reply, and
possibly also get a copy of the mail you reply to inserted into the
reply textarea. Fixing this should be a minor hack that is easy to make,
but not so funny to re-hack every time a new debian version comes. So my
questions are: Do you have any suggestions about how to do this? Would
it be something that could be included in next versions?

2. It would be an strong improvement if it was possible see a list of
the first posts of each thread only. Months and years are more or less
arbitrarily related to content. Being selective, It is the subject that
gives you a hint of whether at thread theme is relevant for you, usually
not the date. Also in the search function, it could be good to have the
opportunity to the see the first post only.

3. It could be interesting to have a more blog-like interface
opportunity where a thread is opened with an article-like html-page, and
the comments are organised in threads like today.

While amended reply function is very important for us, 2. ang 3. are
more functions that we would appreciate, and I would like to hear your
opinion on them.

I hope you will find these suggestions and questions relevant.

Best wishes

Flemming Bjerke