Hyperkitty vs. Nabble (was: Launching forum website for GnuCash users)

[Robert Heller]

At Sun, 11 Jan 2015 21:01:36 +0100 Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:

> 
> On Sunday 11 January 2015 11:25:22 John Ralls wrote:
> > > On Jan 11, 2015, at 11:14 AM, Geert Janssens
> > > <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote: The combination of mailman 3
> > > with hyperkitty [5] is something to look forward to: it's still a
> > > mailing list at its core. Hyperkitty provides a forum-like
> > > webinterface on top of it. Messages sent via e-mail (in the
> > > traditional mailing list style) can be viewed on the forum. The
> > > forum side is organized like any forum: the mails are ordered by
> > > topic, you can search, reply to topics or start new threads. Each
> > > message that's generated via the hyperkitty interface will be sent
> > > as an e-mail to the respective mailing list.
> > > 
> > > That should satisfy both people that prefer mailing list and  those
> > > that prefer fora.
> > > 
> > > But as said, it's not released yet. So I'll have to be patient...
> > 
> > Aside from avoiding Nabble’s annoying ads, what does Hyperkitty do
> > that Nabble doesn’t?
> > 
> I'm not involved in hyperkitty so I only know what I've seen from a demo video and some 
> reading.
> 
> And beating/replacing nabble is not why I got interested in hyperkitty. The forum is however a 
> nice additional feature of it which we could use as an answer to a frequent request without too 
> much effort.
> 
> Hyperkitty is primarily targeted to replace the completely outdated pipermail archive interface. 
> That's also how it first caught my attention.
> 
> Since namazu is no longer maintained we don't have our own search interface anymore to our 
> mailing list archives. We tell people to use google site search as a work around. However that 
> has always been just that: a work around. As I understood the ultimate goal is to provide our 
> own search interface again at some point.
> 
> So that's the first promise of hyperkitty: search capability in our mailing lists under our own 
> control.
> 
> Next it offers these archives in a search engine friendly way. I think nabble does that as well, 
> but pipermail apparently doesn't.
> 
> These features in itself make it worthwhile for me to eventually migrate to mailman3/hyperkitty.
> 
> All the rest, like the forum interface is bonus.
> 
> Compared to nabble I suppose it mostly offers a modern web interface and a much tighter 
> integration into mailman.

All I am going to say at this point: *I* don't like the (so called) 'modern 
web interface' forums.  There are some big problems (for me at least) with 
web-based forums:

They require firing up a big resource hog application (eg FireFox -- most of
these 'modern web-based forums' don't work well with Lynx) AND the forums
themselves use way too much Internet bandwidth, which is major a problem for
me since I have a dial-up Internet connection (yes, really, it is what I have
and no I don't have any other options at the moment).

A plain old text-based E-Mail list works great for me: I use a very 
lightweight off-line E-Mail / News reader (it is actually QWK based). New 
messages (questions AND answers) come to me and part of my 'normal' E-Mail 
reading process.  My E-Mail client is lightweight and all of the current batch 
of messages are on local disk storage (once downloaded).  I can compose 
responses using my own text editor (and not have to deal with some funky 
JavaScript editor hackery).  I can even read any saved message *off-line* (no 
need to fire up the old US Robotics V.Everything just to check some little 
thing).

> 
> But as I don't use nabble and hyperkitty is still under heavy development, it's hard to say how 
> they will stack up eventually.
> 
> Geert
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