It has been only a week since I thought about Google Groups and imagine my surprise when I noticed this little box on the "Join this group" page:
You can finally also select your Google Domain Apps e-mail addresses when joining a group, which was very high on my all-time most-wanted list for a really long time. It's not perfect yet (you can't use your aliases yet) but it's definitely a nice enough addition on its own :D
Primary link: ejohn.org
Today, John Resig wrote a really nice (and quite lenghty) post about Google Groups and why he dislikes it because of its interaction with SPAM. The article is a really nice read so I highly recommend to check it out. I've been a participant on quite a few Google Groups to see the problem. Especially larger groups eventually offen see themselves in a situation where moderating them is so much work, that it's sometimes not worth the effort anymore. So, they either set the moderation limit rather restrictively or move to a different solution altogether simply because Google Groups are a too attractive target for the scum of the adverticing business.
I'm personally not really a big fan of Google Groups. At first I was thrilled by how easy it is to set up a mailinglist + archives with it. For some reason, though, it never had the feel of an integrated solution but this is probably mostly due to also the other Google apps not really integrating themselves not all too well with Google's own Domain Apps. There is also the whole problem of being locked in without a clean way of exporting all mails posted on such a group. For this and also the SPAM problem, a dedicated server is probably the better solution than something so centralized. You simply have far more options at your disposal and can tweak your whole battle-strategy to your own liking. For some reason, I also always fear that one day some spammer will spoof my own email address on too many Google Groups and all my mails sent to other people on GMail will see only the SPAM folder during their 14 days of life :-/
<update>Not that I think mailman is the perfect solution either. Google Groups tries to be somehow a mix between a bulletin board and a mailinglist, which is a good idea, but for me the focus is still too much on the mailinglist part, which has its problems when used for really large communities.</update>
Google Groups is still a nice solution for private groups where members all have a Google account but I definitely understand why some projects are slowly moving away from it for large mailinglists. In this regard I'm also really curious about what solution JQuery will use in the future.
Primary link: groups.google.com
It's strange. When you visit a Google Group and are not logged into your Google Account (if you even have one) you might get the impression that you cannot join that group. If you're already a member of such a group, you've perhaps noticed that you can unsubscribe from it using a <groupname>+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com email address. At first I thought replacing "unsubscribe" with "subscribe" would allow me to join <groupname>, but for some reason Google didn't stick to that pattern. Instead it's <groupname>-subscribe@googlegroups.com ...
Why such a link isn't shown on each group page is beyond me, but at least it is hidden in the the documentation.
(cc) 2004-2009 Horst Gutmann
If not otherwise stated this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.
Smilies taken from phpBB 3.x, Fertigo PRO Regular font by Jos Buivenga (exljbris)
This page uses Google Analytics to collect
usage statistics. If you don't like that, block the JavaScript coming from
www.google-analytics.com.