RE: Here's another reason to avoid yahoogroups

From: Lucas Gonze (lucas@worldos.com)
Date: Thu Apr 19 2001 - 07:02:36 PDT


Yahoogroups works. It just works. The web interface is miles better than
anything else I've seen. The reply-to is correct. The feature set is rich.
Delivery is fast. It is thoroughly debugged and user-tested software.

OTHO you can't migrate _away_ from yahoogroups gracefully, and you can't patch
the software to do things they don't implement. Oh yeah, and there's no way to
get good commercial-grade support.

>From running the decent list I spend a fair amount of time using the admin
interface, and I can tell you that it blows away anything out there.

- Lucas

> So Tom, I do use yahoogroups for several lists, but mostly for
> civilians who don't understand how to use majordomo and need a GUI for
> subbing and unsubbing and so forth. Not that yahoogroup's interface is
> good -- parts of it are severely confusing. But at any rate, read on:
>
> Also sprach Joseph S Barrera III:
> > I'm on a few civilian mailing lists (e.g. my wife's list about
> > breeding/showing cavies) and this word mangling has just been driving
> > people insane. Whoever thought of it should be killed repeatedly.
> >
> > - Joe
> >
> > Also sprach Nick Moffitt:
>
> ----- Forwarded message -----
>
> Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 22:00:13 -0400
> From: Kirrily Skud Robert <skud@infotrope.net>
> Subject: More on Yahoo mail's anti-virus attachment translation
>
> Further to "Yahoo! Mail translates attachments" in RISKS-21.27, I saw
> the following e-mail on a mailing list which discusses medieval cookery:
>
> From: <xxxxxxxxxx@yahoo.com>
> Subject: (OT) "Medireview" ???
>
> Does anyone know why certain Web sites and mail servers change the word
> "medieval" to "medireview" without any warning? Have I missed something?
> Did they change the spelling of the word, and not mail me the notice?
>
> In addition to translating terms like "expression" to "statement" and "eval"
> to "review" in an attempt to disable potential virus code, it seems that
> they don't check for word boundaries, so "eval" is translated to "review"
> even when it's within a word like "medieval".
>
> It's easy to fix this in Perl (for instance), where the programmer
> would write
>
> s/\beval\b/review/g
>
> to check for word boundaries.
>
> The RISKS? Firstly, "two wrongs don't make a right." Yahoo's half-baked
> attempt to fix one problem without adequate thought or testing has caused
> more problems. Secondly, while the mangling of the word "medieval" on a
> cookery mailing list may be unimportant, similar mangling occurring to a
> person's name, address, e-mail address, URL or other important data could
> have knock-on effects of a much more serious nature.
>
> Addendum: I've just had a report of an actual instance of a mangled
> e-mail address:
>
> > Someone [...] changed his e-mail address to "cheval" and several of us
> > couldn't get his new address straight because it kept coming up at
> > "chreview". Eventually, we realized what the word actually was, but it
> > took a while.
>
> *sigh*
>
> Kirrily "Skud" Robert http://infotrope.net
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
>



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