Mailing lists really are preferable for a number of reasons but unfortunately Google Groups or worse, mailman is the interface, and they're both pretty bad.
"Mailing lists really are preferable for a number of reasons but unfortunately Google Groups or worse, mailman is the interface, and they're both pretty bad."
How in the world would you improve mailman ?
Not enough js for you ? Not enough on-hover events ? Too much plain text and obvious links ?
Please, please - to everyone reading this today and into the future - do not fix mailman. Go "fix" something else.
Well, not emailing me a password in the clear once a month would be a start. Needing yet another username and password for a site they already has its own some sort user login system is another wart that is easy enough to solve, but for some reason or another, hasn't been fixed on any sites in recent memory.
My email address was already validated with main site sign up, I shouldn't need to repeat that for every mailing list I want to subscribe to on top of that.
If you're reading this from the future, please let me know if any open federated systems managed to come into being, or if spammers finally managed to kill off email so important business is conducted via Snapchat.
The biggest reason is that it's asynchronous. Not everything needs an answer right now this instant, and in order for there to be an instant reply, someone has to be on the other end of the keyboard and continual interruption is a way to get nothing done real fast.
