[Yak] re: What an archaic forum

[Andrejs Ozolins]

I've been off on a bike ride for a bit, so I'm late to this debate. For 
sure, I prefer the clean realm of plain-text email to any of the 
presumably less-archaic virtual venues. The YAK list is for sure the 
simplest way I can maintain my awareness of the Bike Friday info people 
share or inquire about. I also belong to a number of lists that have the 
presumably hipper lists and, without exception, the email versions are 
more difficult to read and cluttered with extraneous information; and 
the web versions require logins and navigation through not only the 
messages but additional pages that don't contain anything I want to see.

At the same time, there's that quirk of the "Mailman" software that runs 
YAK, the quirk I've periodically tried to find some help for -- the 
failure to wrap lines. I use Mailman on our bike club email list, for 
example, and the archives are extremely difficult to read because 
Mailman inserts the "pre" tag into the message -- a tag that makes any 
browser render the text without alteration. So, if there is no line feed 
in the message, the text just runs off to the right until the end of the 
paragraph. I've never figure out how that tag gets put in (not all 
messages seem to have it); and I certainly have no way of changing the 
way Mailman works.

Does anyone know whether someone is still working on Mailman and could 
be contacted for a revision or bug fix? (The ideal solution would be if 
Mailman were upgraded to behave the way Alex Wetmore's lists do -- or if 
Alex somehow could make his system accessible to BF and others.)

Anyhow, keep YAK as it is. Fight off change as much as possible; the 
change that happens anyway will be more than enough to drive us crazy.

Andrejs
Ithaca, NY