Oh cripes, not that. Too much traffic for #maemo to handle will be the real problem.

wouldn't want the unwashed masses bumbling around in the clubhouse.

I have a lot of experience with Java IRC clients, and the only thing they manage to do is severely impact the SNR of the channels that they allow access to. Now, this may not matter to people who aren't spending time in the channel, but for those of us that do, it's a rather significant burden.

For example, this is the sort of traffic that penguinbait's client on his blog tends to bring in.

What if the client only allowed logged-on maemo.org users?

From a purely technical standpoint, a clean way of dealing with nick collisions would be needed.

Just noticed that the threads are sorted the "wrong way" for me; the newest threads should be at the top, not at the bottom. The Mail Archive version is still better for me.

I personally would make new forums / subforums under talk.maemo.org and make any posts to these forums act like the mailing lists. That is, if you post to these forums, the post is added to the mailing list. Perhaps only subscribers to the mailing lists can post in these forums.

But I suspect the main reason people use the mailing lists is because it is another way to reduce the "signal to noise" ratio. The threshold to entry is higher, so fewer "newbies" use the lists to post. Just another clubhouse.

You, apparently, aren't a subscriber.

that was what I was thinking too, itt (or maemo.org ? will both accounts merge?) derived nick like qole_itt or whatever and only logged in users of course. Also the entry/leave channel message had to be somehow supressed (which is maybe not possible?)

As for the traffic, yes, easier access could mean more traffic and reduced S/N ratio. However in theory anyone could join even now and the noise is already quite high so do you feel it is really closed club of well behaving people now? Also allowing only real maemo/itt users with some rules in place (ban, account locking, karma penalty?,..) could make them actually nicer than any random irc user.

Anyway, it was just an idea, even integrating current log and searchable archive without any ability to post could help.

Oh come on, there's better links than that!

There's this thing called "filters". Mailing list messages don't need to touch your INBOX, they can be easily and automatically filed in a folder. I have one for each mailing list I'm subscribed to, my mail client does better threading than a forum, better searching, and I don't have to go hunting for new messages, they come straight to me, and my mailer neatly tells me which ones are unread (and with a simple keypress I can go to the next unread). When I'm a newcomer or not a subscriber, I can search in the archives (I prefer gmane, but in a pinch google will do).

Well, I agree on this one. One of three, not bad
A forum sucks: you have to go hunting for new messages (and meanwhile you're also downloading messages that you already read), there's usually no good threading support and it's more difficult to keep track of everything. Oh, and I don't have a local copy of the forum (my mail store is always there in case of need, though from time to time I just purge old messages).
It's difficult to follow more than a handful of forums, while it's much more efficient to be subscribed to various dozens mailing lists.
Sure, you usually (but not in all cases) have to subscribe, but I find it less intrusive than registering at yet-another-forum.