How do the mailing list and newsgroup interrelate?
The mailing list is older. When the newsgroup was created, they diverged. In mid-2001, Dave Thomas created a two-way gateway that would “mirror” the newsgroup to the list and vice versa. (This was accomplished in 200 lines of Ruby code.) It is not perfect; because of variability in the news feed, sometimes messages are dropped or duplicated. The online archive of the mailing list therefore includes most of the traffic on the newsgroup, excluding the posts that were made before the creation of the gateway. Note: Spam or other inappropriate messages are not the responsibility of Dennis Oelkers, who now maintains the gateway. He does everything in his power to deal with this issue. Do not report spam to his ISP merely because the messages come from his server. Also note that there are some header-related glitches that affect the behavior of the newsreaders and the gateway. Feel free to report any problems you see, but there will always be a certain (very small) percentage of problems that
