eighty-twenty

(Update: Shortly after I posted this, I contacted the working-group chair, and he quickly replied to let me know that the group’s settings have been changed. It’s now possible to subscribe to group activity as a spectator. Posting is still restricted to group members, of course, but now others can follow along, which makes me happy.)

It’s almost impossible to follow the scheme-reports-wg1 Google Group, because

• you can’t join the google-group unless you’re part of the working group itself (no joining as a spectator)
• the interfaces available to non-google-group members are insufficient:
  • the RSS/Atom feeds truncate posts, meaning you have to click through to the google-group webpage for reading threads
  • the thread-reading pages themselves are not easy to catch up on (compare Thunderbird, an NNTP client, or even Google Reader here)
• the volume of the list is very high at the moment.

I’d be happy if there were

• a full-content RSS/Atom feed somewhere (for some reason I don’t trust that the existing feed (or perhaps Google Reader) is doing well in keeping posts in chronological order, either); or,
• an NNTP feed of the group (!); or,
• a regular mailman-style mailing list for the group.

The current setup really doesn’t work well for me at all, which is disappointing, as lots of the discussions I’ve overcome the awkwardness of the interface to read are really very interesting.