Ask Slashdot: Best Solution For an Email Discussion Forum?

[Tim Krimm]

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/06/18/2247226/ask-slashdot-best-solution-for-an-email-discussion-forum

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John3 writes "For the past 15+ years I've maintained The 
Hardlines Digest (URL omitted to reduce the /. effect), an email 
discussion list for members of the retail hardware and lumber 
business. Since the beginning I've run the list on a Windows box 
running Lyris Listmanager, and it's worked admirably over the 
years. However, the list now has over 2,600 members and 
Listmanager doesn't have a nice web interface for users that like 
to read via their browser. Listmanager also doesn't handle 
attachments and HTML formatting well for the daily 'digest' 
version of the discussions. Finally, I'd really like to move 
hosting off-site so I don't need to maintain the server. The list 
members are hardware store owners and many are technically 
challenged, so I need to keep change to a minimum and make it 
easy for them to migrate. I've considered Google Groups and that 
seems to have most of the features I need. Are there any other 
low cost solutions for hosting a large discussion list?"

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later in discussion


The D programming language people have successfully combined a 
mailing list and tradition web forum into one. What's more, the 
web forum is lightning fast to boot (fastest ever forum I've ever 
used - why can't phpBB etc. be that fast?).

The exact specifics are unknown to me, but from what I've heard, 
they've done a terrific job:
http://forum.dlang.org/ [dlang.org]


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later in discussion

Sweet Jesus Fuck that is fast.


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later in discussion


Vladimir Panteleev (aka CyberShadow) has mentioned some of the 
reasons why it's so fast at ycombinator [ycombinator.com]:

* Optimized and deflated static resources
* Deflated HTML output
* SQLite prepared statements
* Integrated HTTP server (although it's currently in front of an 
Apache proxy)
* An optimized string builder 
(https://github.com/CyberShadow/DAppenderResearch)
* RAM cache of frequent DB queries

A Reddit story exists too where he speaks more about it:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ppre5/the_new_d_online_forum_software_written_in_d/#c3rhk2i 
[reddit.com]


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more stuff