The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Donjan Rodic <address@concealed>]

On 14.10.2014 17:46, Erik Olson wrote:

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On 2014-10-14 11:31, Nikolay Shaplov wrote:

I'd like to add my opinion as a user: Please do not break possibility to use web interface with _javascript_ off. I prefer to keep _javascript_ off when it is not really necessary and web sites that can't handle that makes me sad. And I would be very sad if I had to turn on _javascript_ for _my_own_ mail list. I would not like that.

Sigh.  I will offer my experience/opinion as well.  This is 2014.  It would be really nice to see the front end on sympa advance like the rest of the web. 

Our organization uses mailing lists for communication, because we believe "push" is much better for keeping people in communication than a Forum that requires one to explicitly visit.  I still think Sympa is the best mailing list software out there.  And it's so important to have non-commercial alternatives to something Google or Yahoo.

But a certain subset of our users constantly berate the UI on Sympa for not being friendly enough... clumsy to navigate, not easy to reply, hard to search, etc.   MHonarc hasn't really improved in 10 years.  But _javascript_ (and by extension, AJAX and JQuery) have matured to the point where everything on the web with anything more than simple content is now using it.  If the tool works for the job, it should be used.

(As an aside, I wish there were an automatic plug-in that would autodetect e-mails with attached images and scale them down to something reasonable, thus allowing people who send pictures from their phones to participate more easily.  This is probably our #2 sympa 'issue' where the Internet has moved and sympa hasn't really caught up to the change yet.)

Thanks for your consideration,

  - Erik Olson

--
from the desk of Erik D. Olson - address@concealed

I refrained from "me too"-ing Nikolay's opinion earlier today, but I don't think he's arguing against a nice _javascript_ supported interface for Sympa. Just don't make it unusable or heavily feature degraded without JS, which sure means more work, but there's that portion of Sympa users who have JS off per default (as I do on older machines/netbooks, and I also prefer running NoScript/ScriptSafe in every browser generally).

cheers
Donjan