Looper's Delight Archive Top (Search)
Date Index
Thread Index
Author Index
Looper's Delight Home
Mailing List Info

[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Date Index][Thread Index][Author Index]

Re: LD mailing list question



At 2:55 PM -0800 1/4/01, Todd Quincy wrote:
>This is primarily for Kim but I thought others may benefit.
>
>Kim, I would like to know how I would be create a email-chatroom like the
>this one for my site. Is this a program I can buy, how much space will it
>eat up.

The Looper's Delight mailing list runs on Smartlist, a free and
open-sourced mailing list application that has been around for many years.
Smartlist runs on unix and linux servers, and if you are reasonably
comfortable with that it is not hard to set up. I run it on an x86 based
linux server. I like Smartlist because it is very fast and very easy to
customize any way you like. It readily offers most options you might want
for a list, but then there is a user community that has created many
additional add-ons over the years. And if you get more adventurous you can
code your own. Smartlist is based on  procmail, a free and open-sourced
mail scripting language that is widely used on unix and linux servers for
mail processing. You can find info on both at http://www.procmail.org.

eGroups is probably easier to set up, but then as listowner you are giving
up control over your's and the list's destiny. You will be at the mercy of
their policies and the future viability of their shakey dotcom business
plan. Personally, I'm not willing to do that.

Indeed, I even took Looper's Delight out of the world of retail web-hosting
for similar reasons. Everywhere I tried I found the services to be far too
unreliable and the quality of support to be incompetent on a good day. You
never know when a host company is going to blink out of business without
warning, or sell your accounts to some other company that has no idea what
they are doing. (that happened to me twice.) Some of you probably remember
a couple years ago when the site was completely offline for significant
chunks of time due to lame web hosting companies. I couldn't tolerate that
any longer. Also, with a site as large as Looper's Delight, the incremental
charges I was forced to pay as things grew became exhorbitant. Especially
considering how lousy the service was and that you usually share the server
with hundreds of other sites doing who knows what.

So instead I got my own server at a co-location facility, and partnered
with a couple of other mid-sized sites to share the cost. I've not had any
problems since. We have a whole server to ourselves, we have total control
over it and can do anything we want, and we have plenty of breathing room
to grow, and it is cheaper for sites this large than any retail web-host.
(in fact, we can fit another partner, if anybody with a large site is
interested.)

Another benefit to running your own list: If you are a business, or you
want a more professional feel to your site, or you want a more integrated
user community, keeping it all together on one site is definitely the way
to go. The list will bring people to the rest of your site and vice-versa.
Likewise, archives of the list will bring in new users from search engines,
who will then likely explore the rest of your site. This will increase
traffic and participation at your site exponentially, while giving users a
more complete experience. (Looper's Delight now gets about 400,000 hits a
month from about 60,000 different visitors, mainly due to the archive - and
it keeps growing like a weed....)  You won't get that effect with an
outside service like eGroups. But if you just want to throw together some
temporary discussion list and you don't care about such things, eGroups is
probably easier to deal with.

Some other technical details for you geeks out there: the Looper's Delight
mailing list archive is automatically put together using Mhonarc, a
wonderful mail-to-html convertor. (http://www.mhonarc.org)  The search
engine is an older version of glimpse, which is nice and fast, although a
bit buggy. (we built in some work-arounds for the bugs....)   At the top is
a program tying glimpse and mhonarc together called "wilma". Wilma is
functional but cosmetically ugly. I've been meaning to get in and give it a
face-lift but haven't gotten around to it. Such changes are easy though,
because again: wilma is open-sourced and free! You can find all three of
those through the mhonarc site.

hope this was interesting,
kim

______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                     | Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com    | http://www.loopers-delight.com