In a little over a week’s time, all of Cycling 74′s community
discussions will be web-only. On Friday, February 20, 2009, we will
be shutting off all of our public, two-way mailing lists. This includes:

dev@cycling74.com
java-dev@cycling74.com
javascript-dev@cycling74.com
jitter@cycling74.com
jitter-dev@cycling74.com
pluggo@cycling74.com
radial@cycling74.com

In order to participate in our discussions, you will need to use our
web forums, located at http://www.cycling74.com/forums/index.php

Additionally, ending our public mailing lists will correspond with an
upgrade to our forum software, which we hope will offer greater stability and
useful features, such as post editing.

We understand that some of you may be upset by this decision.
However, know that this decision was not something we took lightly,
nor was it hastily decided. The fact is, the mailing lists have had
a sell-by date since we started the forums. The reason they lasted so
long, and that we went through the trouble of tying them to our forums,
is because we realize how fond of them many of you are.

We have two primary reasons for ending the mailing lists, which basically
boil down to:

1. The difficulty of synchronizing the forums and mailing lists, from both
technical and cultural perspectives, has compromised the user experience.

2. The ease with which public mailing lists can be targeted by
spammers. With hundreds of thousands of messages per day being sent to
our mailing lists, fighting spam has become far too time-consuming and
expensive for us to support.

Some of you may say “well, I don’t want to browse the forums – I
like having the list come into my mailbox” and for those of you, have you
considered RSS? We have RSS feeds for each of the forums. Here are their URLs:

All topics: http://www.cycling74.com/forums/atom.php?mode=m&l=1&n=10&basic=1
Max/MSP: http://www.cycling74.com/forums/atom.php?frm=7&mode=m&l=1&n=10&basic=1
Jitter: http://www.cycling74.com/forums/atom.php?frm=8&mode=m&l=1&n=10&basic=1
Pluggo: http://www.cycling74.com/forums/atom.php?frm=9&mode=m&l=1&n=10&basic=1
radiaL: http://www.cycling74.com/forums/atom.php?frm=10&mode=m&l=1&n=10&basic=1
Dev: http://www.cycling74.com/forums/atom.php?frm=15&mode=m&l=1&n=10&basic=1
Javascript: http://www.cycling74.com/forums/atom.php?frm=17&mode=m&l=1&n=10&basic=1
Java: http://www.cycling74.com/forums/atom.php?frm=18&mode=m&l=1&n=10&basic=1

We also have a beta version of the RSS feeds that include a couple of minor
improvements, such as a link to reply to the post, which was implemented
specifically for folks switching to RSS from the mailing list. If you save
your login on the forums, this will allow you to immediately reply to the topic
at hand, rather than requiring you to login, navigate to the forum thread and
find the “post” link.

You can access the beta version by simply taking the above URL, and adding
substituting “atom-test.php” for “atom.php”.

Note, the feeds are quite customizable, if you haven’t taken a look at

http://www.cycling74.com/forums/index.php?t=help_index&section=boardusage#syndicate

you’ll find that the customizable options include,

* pulling feeds not just for certain forums, as listed above, but also by
category & topic
* number of messages retrieved
* date cutoffs
* date ordering

It might take a period of initial adjustment, but I think many of you will
find that RSS feeds feel very similar to the mailing lists.

It’s also worth mentioning that, although we won’t officially support it, there
are RSS->email services out there that would be capable of pulling our feeds
into your mailboxes.

If you receive any of our mailing lists, your last e-mail will be
sent on February 20. This will contain a reminder that the mailing
lists will be ending. After that, we sincerely hope you’ll continue to
participate in our community either via our web site or RSS.

Thanks,

Wally

(Speaking on behalf of Cycling ’74)

i could get very agitated over this, but instead just start feeling old.
sigh.

h
http://www.hans-w-koch.net

p

ps: so i have to befriend with this rss feed stuff now…

hans w. koch wrote:
> now thats one sad news for breakfast.
>
> i could get very agitated over this, but instead just start feeling old.
> sigh.
>
> h
> http://www.hans-w-koch.net

–

http://pure.test.at
http://www.myspace.com/pvre
http://www.heartchamberorchestra.org

http://www.trblnc.org

> i could get very agitated over this, but instead just start feeling
> old.

Indeed. As the person responsible for starting the Max mailing list
in 1992, I shall light a candle or something.

For Mac users, NetNewsWire is your friend.

– N.

nick rothwell — composition, systems, performance — http://
http://www.cassiel.com

> On 14 Feb 2009, at 07:47, hans w. koch wrote:
>
> i could get very agitated over this, but instead just start feeling old.
>>
>
> Indeed. As the person responsible for starting the Max mailing list in
> 1992, I shall light a candle or something.
>
> For Mac users, NetNewsWire is your friend.
>
>

Thanks for the tip. I just gave it a try.

One major problem I see is that all messages appear in chronological order
instead of grouped in threads like in a mail client. My brain doesn’t do
multi threading very well, and Re : Re : Re : Re is sooo 1993.

I guess there must be a script or some other way to achieve this. Any ideas?

Thijs

i have all max-list mails from 2002 until now on local disc
so i can search for help when i’m not able to be online….

will the rrs thingy save all messages on my disc or is it just a “viewer”

hope you guys at c74 make good backups of the forum …….

-mj

What I’ll miss is that I tend to keep (ie store locally) specific
posts that either have a useful patcher in them, or contain a solution
or idea that I can’t use right now, but that I think merits further
investigation. So that won’t be possible any more. I guess that I’ll
use Evernote instead, and store potentially useful posts to that. ( http://www.evernote.com
– very useful service)

David

On 14 Feb 2009, at 11:09, Thijs Koerselman wrote:
>
> One major problem I see is that all messages appear in chronological
> order instead of grouped in threads like in a mail client. My brain
> doesn’t do multi threading very well, and Re : Re : Re : Re is sooo
> 1993.
>

I can be quite a curmudgeon when it comes to things like this, and have found that the transition to RSS feeds took about 2 minutes to get use to. I’m sure YMMV, but given the options available the change seems reasonable to me.

Cheers,
David

>
> That’s not true.

OK. I stand corrected. I’ll have a look to see if I can do something
like that in NNW.

ta

David

>
> I can be quite a curmudgeon when it comes to things like this, and have
> found that the transition to RSS feeds took about 2 minutes to get use to.
> I’m sure YMMV, but given the options available the change seems reasonable
> to me.
>
>

With Apple Mail, is it possible to group the items by subject thread? In
NetNewsWire I only managed to sort all the messages by subject name, which
is no solution since it messes up the date order. Being used to reading
lists in gmail I’d go nuts if all the items were mixed up like they are now
in my client. In Mail I’ve tried View->Sort by Thread, but that groups the
max subjects completely wrong. I really hope I’m missing something.

Thijs

The feeds are generated in real-time, so if NNW isn’t showing it to you, it is
because of NNW, and not the feed. As soon as a new post appears, it is available
via the feed.

w

The RE:RE:RE:s are added by folks’ mail programs, and will not be present once
the mailing list is turned off, because the forum does not add all those when
someone replies.

w

> What I’ll miss is that I tend to keep (ie store locally) specific posts
> that either have a useful patcher in them, or contain a solution or idea
> that I can’t use right now, but that I think merits further
> investigation. So that won’t be possible any more.

In the more recent versions of NNW, I use a “Clippings” folder to store anything
useful that comes across my RSS feeds. I even have it subdivided, so there’s a
“Patches” folder, a “Torrents” folder, a “Right-Wing Idiocy” folder, a “Cool
Matrixsynth Videos” folder, a “CDM” folder, etc. etc.

I haven’t looked into it, but I could probably sync the Clippings folder offline
as well.

One thing I’ll also mention: if the RSS feeds aren’t behaving the way you would
like them to, you can use something like Yahoo Pipes to mash them up into
something more unique to your needs. For example, it should be possible to
create a Yahoo Pipe that only shows posts with patches attached to them.

Look at it this way: as was stated in my original email, Cycling just can’t
continue to support the mailing lists. However, we’ve given you some excellent
resources that will allow you to build your own solutions. If you don’t have the
time to build them yourself, then wait for somebody else to come up with
something close to what you need, and tweak it. It almost goes without saying,
but I would hope that anyone who is building stuff with Yahoo Pipes, etc. would
share them with the rest of the community.

The bottom line is, the community discussions are not going away as a resource;
they’re simply evolving into something more sustainable for the company to support.

cheers

w

On 14 Feb 2009, at 18:23, Wallace Winfrey wrote:

> David Stevens wrote:
>> Well, I _was going to reply to this from NetNewsWire, but it hasn’t
>> appeared there yet! Anyway …
>
> The feeds are generated in real-time, so if NNW isn’t showing it to
> you, it is
> because of NNW, and not the feed. As soon as a new post appears, it
> is available
> via the feed.
>
> w

I just found that, so I’ll try using it. It may be that the Evernote
approach is better, as I can tag as I go. I’ll see.
>
> Look at it this way: as was stated in my original email, Cycling
> just can’t
> continue to support the mailing lists.

That’s fair enough. There’s bound to be a little bit of mumbling from
us old guys though – it’ll pass, because we have more flexible brains
compared to other people of similar ages, because of all the maxing we
do. :-)
> ,
> but I would hope that anyone who is building stuff with Yahoo Pipes,
> etc. would
> share them with the rest of the community.

yes please … anyone?
>
thanks

David

Yes, definitely. That’s part of the forum software, and separate from the
mailing list.

cheers

w

I was just trying that too and it doesn’t seem to work. I think we’re in the same boat, Thijs. I was using gmail for the Max mailing lists and it was a really great way to follow conversations thanks to the threaded view. My only concern for using RSS is I can’t find an RSS reader with a threaded view. I don’t think anyone bothered to make this feature because RSS is normally used for news headlines rather than forums.

It’s don’t care how the forum messages are delivered, I just want a client that gives me the view I want…

I’ll keep looking, there’s gotta be a way. Worst case we can try a service that will forward the RSS feed to gmail.

Now if only Ableton would get some RSS going too – Surely there’ll be
benefits to just having one forum team for both companies? It’s bound to
happen eventually ;)

Andreas.

-Miguel

Indeed. This seems good, I’m going to use Thunderbird as my RSS reader. Thanks for the tip.

Andreas, I saw SharpReader when googling around but it’s Windows only and I’m on a Mac.

>
> You can use Thunderbird to subscribe to RSS feeds, AND it can organize
> posts by threads.
>
>
Great. I can stop worrying now. From Wally’s post I understand that we’ll be
able to customize things anyway.

I just had a quick look at Yahoo Pipes. It seems quite trivial to write
filters. I doubt if this would be possible but it would be cool if we could
decode the compressed patcher format back to JSON inside the Yahoo Pipes.
You can then write filters to search for patches containing only certain
objects. For example: “find all post with patches containing
jit.gl.asyncread”…. Just a thought.

I have been largely ignoring the whole RSS thing up till now. Seems like
it’s worth getting used to.

Thijs

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 8:33 PM, Wallace Winfrey wrote: