PEG and Xenophobia

Chris Kelleher

Administrator
Staff member
Originally posted by bendaluz2
Could you not provide a button to allow a message to be emailed to the PEG user in the same way that you can to other Progresstalk members, i.e. the email address is never shown.

That's a good suggestion, I'll see if we can implement something like this. Thanks :)
 

Chris Kelleher

Administrator
Staff member
Originally posted by Petr Vavrinec
I just want you to know that today's discussion on PEG about ProgressTalk made me to come here and registrate. It's just beyond me, how some PEGgers could, on one hand, complain about the famous `Progress Who?' syndrome, and on the other hand actively try to stop the information from spreading.

Thanks Petr for your comments and welcome to the site! Yes, I'm a little confused as well as to why another Progress resource would be looked at as being a bad thing.
 

Chris Kelleher

Administrator
Staff member
Originally posted by mnewnham
As someone involved in cross-disciplinary work, I find email groups are a much more efficient way of delivering, filtering out unwanted information and responding to queries.

I would agree, there are people that are more comfortable (and faster) at reading an email list, and others that prefer a web interface, and others that prefer newsgroups. That's why I think having all of those various interfaces for a discussion group is a good idea. Both the MySQL and PHP lists (both of which I read), also have some sort of web archive, and newsgroups associated with them
 

bendaluz2

Member
Personally I cant stand email lists. They are clumsy and awkward and its always a pain to trawl through 99.9% of all the text you recieve to find the 0.1% you are interested in. If Progresstalk didnt exist I wouldnt bother signing up to the PEG, its more hassle than its worth (imo)
 

mnewnham

New Member
>> Why on earth would you want to receive every single post on a topic via email. besides the network admin yelling about the traffic, I'd rather hit the site and search on the question when needed as opposed to getting every single email submission on a topic. The boards centralized area for posting and retreiving archive info, not my inbox.

We all have our own way of dealing with stuff. Speaking as my company's mail administrator, The network traffic argument doesn't hold - Mailing lists are text only, and a highly efficient use of bandwidth. 100 messages a day from peg is 500k or less of data. Every excel spreadsheet that comes through my mail server is at least 3mb. Indeed this web page itself is 11k.... anyway, I can digest a dozen emails on a list faster than progresstalk can refresh my "new messages" list . But all this is irrelevant........

This discussion should be focused on the following issue- discuss, agree or disagree:

As a relatively tiny developer community - And lets not argue about that either - Junior ( and senior) progress developers need access to all the experience they can get. Before the creation of this site, the resource to get that help was peg. Adding a second resource ( this board). doesn't increase the number of experienced people out there, it just spreads them thinner. The experienced make their choice as to which resource they are going to cover, so a question may go unanswered because the person who knows the answer has decided to support the alternative forum.

SO.......

I believe that the best enhancements for this forum would be to

1. Integrate messages from peg into the main boards, not segregate them into a separate area.

2. Automatically post responses to these questions back to peg.

3. Ultimately, post all the messages on the forum on to peg. Those of us who use mailing lists are entirely capable of managing, in our own way, a reasonable message volume ( Try subscribing to php.general at 600+ messages / week!!!!)

OR, create an integrated newsgroup from the 2 sources.


We're all the same community. Again, the only losers are those who want help.


Regards

Mark
 

Crittar

Member
I just noticed the following on the PEG forum.

NOTE - FOLLOWING QUOTE TAKEN FROM PEG IMPORTS

At 09:10 AM 12/11/2002 -0500, Hermiz, Jon wrote:
>Im kind of confused...whatever you post on the progress site gets posted
>back on the peg I take it?

Yes. It's an exact mirror, it's simply an extension of the same thing.

>So this goes for progresstalk.com as well.

No. Absolutely not. That is the whole issue, these things would not
be a problem if it were just a mirror. Instead new people go there
and think there is all this activity, post expecting lots of answers,
get none, and go away angry. That's what divides the community.
And it's the division of the community that's a problem. If it
were totally two way, it would simply be the same community.

It seems that the peggers are complaining that the traffic is not two way.

Whose fault is that? Reading through this thread you can see that the request has been made to give us the means to reply. It is PEG that tries to ostracise / destroy this forum, not the other way round.
 
If I may be so bold as to suggest something.....

It should not be possible to post a local message on ProgressTalk to a forum imported from PEG. Rather any attempt to post should be re-directed to PEG (possibly attributed to ProgressTalk :D )

Reading the posting below it appears that somebody tried to post to a Peg list from the ProgressTalk site and go no replies (well there's a surprise!)

I read both PEG and ProgressTalk - Though I am not subscribed to PEG I still post there periodically to remind the world that I still exist.

It took me 13 years to find ProgressTalk, and I'm extremely glad I did and grateful to Chris for providing this forum. That doesn't mean I won't post to PEG! When appropriate, I will post to PEG and I will continue to use and read all the Progress resources I can.
 

bino

Member
I kind of find this whole debate a bit humerous. I mean does Progress not want to foster its development community? do you think folks on SQL boards, ASP boards or lists, java boards or lists complain about these types of things.

In my opinion Progress needs as much an open forumn, lists whatever about its products as possible because there are hardly any.

As it stands, This site Progresstalk.com is the <b>only</b> I repeat <b>only</b> consistent, informational web board related to anything Progress. Everything else is either some guy posting a word doc online with broken links, and the PEG.
 

Crittar

Member
Toby,

I almost agree with you:

Any post to the PEG forum should be copied over there (it is their insularity which prevents this, not ours) but it should also be shown here so that anyone browsing ProgressTalk also has access to the information. The aim is to provide assistance to all who need it and the answers we seek are often found from existing posts without having to re-post the same question. If the answer were not displayed here as well then that aim would be defeated.
 
Hi Crittar

Re-reading my post I must have been tired when I typed it! :blush1:

What I meant to say was (as you say) "If you reply to the PEG list on ProgressTalk, the reply should only be posted to the PEG." My reasoning is as follows
a) The entire PEG forum to which you are replying is available on ProgressTalk, so your reply will be available.
b) Any post which is limited to ProgressTalk will not be received by the originator of the question necessarily since they may be an insular peggist and not read ProgressTalk!

I don't know if this is possible but it may assist goodwill if Chris were able to attribute the post to the poster but state that it was replied via ProgressTalk. That way the more extreme peggists may feel that ProgressTalk is valuable to them rather than solely using their experience.

To an extent I understand where they are coming from. They post to Peg and it is read somewhere else and the traffic is one-way. If it could be reversed so that the traffic was two-way I am confident that some ego's might be deflated somewhat!
 

Crittar

Member
Toby,

Your reasoning is good.

The problem with it is that PEG (from past experience) is unwilling to allow the traffic to be two way. I have seen in other threads on here that Chris Schrieber was banned from PEG.

Sadly, I think this is a case of 'you can lead a horse to water but you can't force it to drink'.
 

Chris Kelleher

Administrator
Staff member
Yes I was banned from PEG a few years back (I was even a paid member at the time).

It would be a very simple process to have posts made here in the PEG category to be emailed over to the correct email list, however I am sure those emails would be blocked.
 
Just a note on this topic Chris - The attribution of the Peg emails seems to have gone since the rework of the site! We wouldn't want you to get into any more trouble!

Now that PEG is being co-hosted by PSC themselves, they may be more open to the idea of having external sites contributing to Peg. It may be worth approaching Greg Higgins directly rather than just "attaching" to the various lists

Just some thoughts!
 
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