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Try this Michael, when you see the front page click “View posts since last visit”. Really, it doesn’t get any simpler.

Who are these “many users” Michael and what makes it so clear? You’re the only person so far who has an issue, why can’t you use an e-mail filters like I suggested?

I’m not doing any more work on this for only a handful of people, unless someone can prove conclusively that we really need it. So far all I’m seeing is a few developers who just kinda recon there are heaps of users out there who want a mailing list. But the facts point to entirely the opposite trend.

Okay, there are no new posts, so I can’t check, but I’ve got a couple
of questions:

What if you don’t read all of the messages on a given visit, will it
then skip those messages you missed when you next visit?

Is there a way for it to skip forums that your not interested in? For
example, right now the vast majority of new posts are developers.
What if you’re just interested in opponents. It will always say new
messages even if none are for opponents, right? You mentioned e-mail
filters, but is there an equivalent for the web-based forums?

How did I get isolated in this discussion? Anyway, using an e-mail
filter is not really a solution, it’s just a kludge. I don’t mind
doing it, but I’m not sure I’d expect the average person to set up
e-mail filters just to get at the opponents wanted list. It wouldn’t
even be so straightforward. It’s easy enough for me, because I’m
filtering out the opponents wanted, but it would certainly take more
effort to do the opposite.

  • M.

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Probably, it’s best to read them in one go.

Unfortunately, like everything in life, it’s not perfect. You do need to make some effort. If a user only wanted to view Opponents Wanted then he would manually go into that section and read the threads. He would not use “View all posts since last visit”.

Well, you are the original poster of this thread, you started the topic! :slight_smile:

Exactly. Thankfully the average person does not want to use an e-mail list so there’s no problem.

On 2/25/08, Michael Kiefte wrote:

Don’t worry, you aren’t alone. There are others who see the value in
having a choice of viewing via email or a web-based forum. The
different ways have different advantages, and won’t appeal to
everyone.

For example, the only way I’m able to keep up with whats going on is
via my mobile device. Viewing the forum via my mobile device sucks.
And if the email option wasn’t available, well, I just wouldn’t be
able to read when I have the chance (which means I just wouldn’t).
The web-based solution doesn’t work for mobile devices.

Ben, I know you think everyone else in the world but the developers
thinks only one way, but its not the case. The better approach would
be to extend the functionality to include as many people’s preference
as possible. Moving to the forums was a step in this direction as
there are no doubt many people that may prefer this option. But the
current mail option is incomplete, leaving those who prefer that
method less than satisfied.

I know you sort-of think, oh well no point in doing it for a small
number of people. I’m glad the VASSAL developers don’t take that
position when obscure but doable features are requested. Plus, I
think there could be greater appeal than you think. Imagine if we had
an “announcements” forum, and you could subscribe to that by email.
Then those who wanted announcements delivered to their inbox could
stay up-to-date, and could use the forums when they were looking for
an opponent. The current operation of the mail list doesn’t allow for
this hybrid approach.

Anyhow, for the now, I’ll just need to ignore the stuff that I’m not
interested in. :frowning:

Another option I imagine people would be interested in is RSS. I
don’t seem to find the RSS feeds for the forums. Similar to email,
RSS would be most useful if the feeds were split by forum.


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There’s a big difference here. I could in fact end up putting 48 hours of work into the forum to satisfy 5 users… ever. But obscure features in Vassal can add up to modules being released which hundreds will play. Really what you’re asking me to do could end up being that simple, up to 20 people are going to benefit and still… not everyone will be happy, because you can never make everyone happy. Where do you draw the line and say “ok, that’s enough”?

Tim if you really think this is worth the time then you’re more than welcome to work on the forum software yourself as long as you’re prepared to do the ongoing support. I myself cannot see the time vs benefit value here. I want to help out lots of people, I’m not interesting in helping two or three whiners. Coz that’s all this is.

I’ll fix the RSS stuff soon.

Christ, 48 hours of work to satisfy only 5 users. You poor thing. I have invested thousands of hours into developing Vassal as have the other develpers. I find your attitude completely appalling.

Poor attitude Ben.

Ben, I find you unnecessarily rude, argumentative and a complete PITA. I am now in the process of implementing my email filter as you suggested to filter out your forum messages. I’m really sick and tired of listening to you. I am definitely not interested in anything you have to say, or any improvements you may feel VASSAL requires. Bye Bye.

Regards,
Brent.


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Fair enough, I accept that. But my goal is to make Vassal more accessible to lots of people, not to concentrate on minor issues which do not improve circulation. You choose to spent 000s of hours developing Vassal, that’s great.

I’m not here to make friends or be liked. I just want to make Vassal better.

I’m sorry that you’ve had to resort to personal attacks.

I consider you calling the 3 developers whiners as being personal attacks Ben, so I consider that you are completely responsible for starting the slanging match.

I fail to understand how you consider insulting the developers will do anything to improve Vassal??? I just don’t understand what you are trying to achieve?

I do apologize for letting my emotions get out of hand there.

That’s it for me. I suggest we close this topic.

I am responsible; Apology to all. I’ve been stepping on lots of toes, I should know that Vassal is what it is because of the effort you guys put in. I let it get out of hand so I’m sorry about that. I think I was frustrated the topic came up because I had convinced myself the forum had been settled.

But look, you guys obviously do feel strongly about the filtering issue, and I need to be more receptive to developer’s needs.

Am I correct in saying a fix would be to create a separate mailing list for each forum section?

Look Ben,

I think we just have to be careful to discuss issues quietly and rationally, even if we don’t agree with them.

I re-ignited the discussion because it was not resolved at all. Discussion just dried up.

Honestly, we developers probably don’t really need separate lists for different sections as most of the posts are ours, but we have this nagging feeling that it is a feature that should be there. Perhaps you are right and no-one actually wants it except Tim, but with only 225 subscribers from 1559 that subscribe to the Yahoo group, I feel that it is an issue that will probably be important to a subset of users over time. There is no way a timid subcsriber would mention that they want this feature knowing they are going to get their head snapped off by you.

Why not spend the time and sort it out now, and gain the admiration of both the Vassal and M2F Devs at the same time?

If you really don’t want to, and the topic comes up again, then just politely mention that it is a future enhancement that is on the cards, should there be sufficient demand.

Do you know how many times I have had to politely answer questions like ‘How do I show different images on the same counter?’. We just have to politely point them in the right direction, no matter how much we want to yell at them 8) Its the same principle

Cheers,
Brent.

To be honest, I’m not at all interested in being admired. But I’ll look into the issue because it may be the best thing for Vassal, that’s what I really care about. When I step back and get over myself, I can see your logic that pissing off developers is bad for the project. And if keeping developers happy means making changes to M2F and the forum then that’s the way it is! :smiley:

Thus spake “bsmith”:

We’re arguing that the present mailing list setup drives users away
from the mailing list. This is a claim about the cause of the low
number of users subscribed to the list. You can’t legitimately offer
the low number of users subscribed as evidence agaist this claim.

I think the only way we will be able to resolve this is by fixing the
way Mail2Forum handles mailing lists. (I’ve already detailed how to do
that, BTW.)


J.


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Thus spake “bsmith”:

Michael is not the first person to ask for this, as you’re no doubt
aware.

I’m getting awfully tired of having this repeated. You have no evidence
for this, because there are currently artificial impediments to using
the email list. You speak as though there is a fair contest between
the two, but there is not. This is what we are complaining about, in
fact.

Even if it were the case that the majority of VASSAL users prefer the
forum, that doesn’t make fixing the way lists work pointless. Far from
it, when the people who are asking for it are some of the people who
write the code. I don’t really care if you see it as some sort of
quaint old-fashionedness that some of us prefer to use email, all I
care about is the brute fact that some of us do, and I think it’s
worth accomodating that.

By now, we could have written a patch for M2F to handle this for all
the effort put into this discussion.


J.


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Thus spake “bsmith”:

Why? You have more people asking for the mailing lists to be fixed
than for RSS. Seems like a pointless waste of effort, if you ask me.

Grrrrr.


J.


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RSS is easy to fix, should only take half an hour I think.

Ironically, I’m reading these posts from a Palm device. Palm blows
but it’s convenient. The web-based forum is definitely impossible
with a Palm device though.

I think the tone of this discussion has degenerated. Ben has already
offered his apologies and some concessions as well.

The web-based forum does look quite nice and it’s obvious he’s put
quite a lot into it. However, like all things computer-based, it’s
always going to be a work in progress. We can’t compel Ben to do
whatever we want, but I think someone could offer to do it instead.
Don’t look at me though – I have almost zero experience with even
HTML.

The major feature we need is separate subscriptions for each of the
forums. We need something like checkboxes or whatever. That will
help people reading the forums via e-mail as well as on the web-based
forums.

The other thing I would suggest is that the site record what has been
read instead of relying on the last login time. The other reason I’m
still stuck on e-mail based forums is because I know what I have and
have not read. I often do not have time to read everything in one go
and the reason I don’t respond to issues very quickly on occasion is
that sometimes I just don’t have the time to catch up and I’ll read
the most recent posts piecemeal.

RSS is not a bad idea, but it’s probably not high priority. My naive
impression is that it would be somewhat harder than the other issues
to implement.

  • M.

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Thus spake “bsmith”:

I could be misremembering, because it’s been some time since I looked
at this, so you should check this yourself, but—it’s not possible
to have multiple external lists bridging one forum.

In talking with one of the M2F devs, I described what I think we want:

mail2forum.com/forums/viewto … 3782#13782

The idea is that for each category, you can specify an external mailing
list instead of one external list for the whole site. This way, you have
complete freedom in how you pair lists with categories.

In order to implement this, all you’d need is to add an extra test in
the place in the code where M2F decides where to put incoming mail
(you’d match subjects like it does already, but the default category
for each list could be different) and an extra test in the outgoing
mail part to set the correct list address based on the category.

(I’d be willing to show you where this is in the M2F code, too, since
I’ve already gone so far as to find it myself.)

One thing we’d need to decide is how we want to map categories to
lists. Probably we want the developers cateogry to get its own list.
As for how to funnel the other categories into lists, I don’t have
any strong feelings.


J.


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Thus spake “bsmith”:

I was being sarcastic here, BTW, in case it wasn’t obvious.


J.


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On Tue, February 26, 2008 3:52 pm, Michael Kiefte wrote:

This is, for me, another big win of the email interface. Things that I
want to re-read properly or respond to later can stay in my Inbox, or be
marked as unread or to-do, all the rest gets filed off somewhere as it’s
read. Much more flexibility than either time-stamped or once you’ve seen
it, you’ve seen it.

Cheers,
Tim.


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