Here’s an open question to all.
Myself and a long time group of friends have had a yahoo group set up. This has been an excellent way of keeping in touch with a whole load of people who I would probably not keep in touch with otherwise.
One of our group members has raised reservations about continuing to use Yahoo services due to various censorship issues in china (read this story on BBC about Yahoo helping to jail a chinese blogger). I do not know too much about the validity of this, but said I would investigate some alternatives to using something like Yahoo or Google groups.
So, does anyone out there know of a script (preferably open source) that would offer some of the functionality of Yahoo Groups.
In order of importance, we need:
- Messages to be able to be read on the web
- Posted messages to be delivered to people’s email address either individually or in a daily digest form.
- A group area on the web allowing people to post up files, photos, polls etc
That’s pretty much it.
The thoughts I have had on this so far are:
- that we could use mailman, which would allow emails to be sent out to the group, and would also allow a basic web interface for reading messages;
- that we could use a simple forum software such as phpBB, but this would not really work as a mailing list.
I am sure there must be a more complete solution out there. We have our own server which would allow us a lot of control over what we use, but I would definitely love if there was an all-in-one solution. I had thought that I could install mailman and use something else that would allow file/photo posting, but I want to avoid anything that would confuse the group’s less technologically advanced members.
If anyone knows of any solutions, I’m all ears!
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