I was perusing my referer logs this morning, and found a backlink to the release-notes for Zoë, an open-source Mail application that valiantly attempts to realise some version of JWZ's Intertwingle white-paper. I've heard of Zoë a few times over the years, and have always been meaning to try it out, except for the fact I believed it was web-based, and when given the choice between "web-based interface" and "fully-functional GUI", it takes a hell of a lot of additional functionality to move me from the latter to the former.
Looking at the release-notes, I saw they had some form of integration for my current mail client of choice: Apple's Mail.app integration. "Nifty!", I thought. "I'll have to try that out."
Further down the page, in a previous release-note, I came across this oddity:
In an attempt to help Mark Pilgrim (of diveintomark.org) reduce his bandwidth cost, the application will from now on ignore any attempt to retrieve any url from diveintomark.org and associated sites. The algorithm to protect Mark Pilgrim from having to pay the price of unwanted bandwidth use is as follow: any url simultaneously containing "diveinto" and ".org" will be ignored. This should hopefully cover most of Mark Pilgrim's sites.
The maker of ZOË is publicly urging any person in a position to help Mark Pilgrim reduce his bandwidth cost to do so promptly as Mark Pilgrim's situation is untenable. Removing any references to diveintomark.org and associated web sites from your DNS server should be the most efficient way to help Mark Pilgrim reduce his bandwidth cost. Thank you in advance for helping Mark Pilgrim.
What the...? Being a regular reader of Mark's excellent weblog, I found this rather puzzling, and particularly off-putting. Looking at the date on the announcement, I went through Mark's archives to see where he might have got into an argument with the Zoë maintainer, and found only this discussion, in which someone calling themself Zoe takes offence at Mark's instructions to block bots from his site that don't follow the Robot Exclusion Standard.
The worst thing Mark says about Zoë in the whole exchange, is the quite reasonable request that it hit his RSS feeds somewhat less often than once every five minutes (most aggregators check every hour or half-hour).
Great. So if I start using this application, I'm going to become reliant on some paranoid flake who cripples his program on totally specious grounds. I know I could easily grep the source for the blocking code and remove it, but as a potential user, I really don't want to tie myself to whatever future whims the maintainer might have come across his fevered imagination.
Of course, it makes no difference to Zoë whether I use it or not: I wouldn't be paying for it after all. C'est la vie.
Where is your problem? I think it is great that the Zoe maintainer got in contact with Mark and patched the program to avoid his bandwith abuse.
There is now law on earth that you have to write bots that stick to the rules, it's your job as a webmaster to care about traffic to your site. If other people also care it is just nice.
And Zoë is far away from the first stable version and open source (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/zoe/zoe/FULL_LICENSE.txt?rev=1.1&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup), so why not contributing to it?
best regards, andi
ps.: if you look for something similar but more stable check out X1 (Windows) or Creo's Six Degrees (Mac).
http://www.x1.com/
http://www2.creo.com/sixdegrees/productInfo/
Andreas, you're either painfully naive, or being deliberately disingenuous.
The patch to Zoe is in no way complying with a single wish of Mark's: he goes to great lengths in the post I linked to point out that aside from the frequency-of-requests issue, Zoe was perfectly well-behaved, and since it's not a spider it doesn't need to pay any attention to the exclusion standard.
Zoe's reaction to that is utterly incomprehensible, and appears incredibly petty. He's "taking his toy and going home", while everyone else is shaking their heads wondering what the Hell the problem is?
Why on earth would I want to contribute to a project run by someone that flaky?
As for the point about the Robots Exclusion Standard not being a law: it just reminds me of the constant pseudo-legal debates about spam on news.admin.net-abuse.*
Sure, spam is legal in most jurisdictions. But that doesn't mean it's _acceptable_.
You guys are taking yourself way too seriously... chill out... this is just a prank... you should get out more... too much navel gazing is bad for your health...
Cheers,
Zoe aka "paranoid flake"
>>> The patch to Zoe is in no way complying with a single wish of Mark's: he goes to great lengths in the post I linked to point out that aside from the frequency-of-requests issue, Zoe was perfectly well-behaved, and since it's not a spider it doesn't need to pay any attention to the exclusion standard.
Your are right, sorry, i didn't follow this link.
>>> Zoe's reaction to that is utterly incomprehensible, and appears incredibly petty. He's "taking his toy and going home", while everyone else is shaking their heads wondering what the Hell the problem is?
Sure, what he did was blindfold and shows that he neither got the picture what the discussion was all about nor is someone who works structured. In his position if would have cut off the RSS functionality until i had the time to improve it.
But then, as far as i followed the Zoe-mailinglist, really many people use it, complain about it and cry for features but hardly anyone contributes.
I guess that this is not how OS should work. If you don't like something about a piece of OS-software contribute to it or ignore it instead of throwing harsh words at him.
>>> Why on earth would I want to contribute to a project run by someone that flaky?
As far as i know he is happy about any comment or help he gets and incorporates it.
>>> As for the point about the Robots Exclusion Standard not being a law: it just reminds me of the constant pseudo-legal debates about spam on news.admin.net-abuse.*
Sorry, I did not want to use "law" in legal context.
What i wanted to say is that you have to deal with odd things on the internet as scarcely any behaviour can be forced there and mostly only guidelines, self-imposed rules, etc. exist.
In the same thread someone calling themself "Anil" wrote:
"Hey, Zoe’s nuts! Say some more wacky stuff, Zoe, I’m trying to figure out where exactly you’ve misunderstood Mark."
03:22 PM on February 26, 2003 · comment by Anil
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/02/26/how_to_block_spambots_ban_spybots_and_tell_unwanted_robots_to_go_to_hell#t153
s to me like Raphael finds the whole idea of a large and growing script to block spambots rather amusing and thinks it will be ultimately ineffective. You may not like it, but this is legitimate criticism in the form of satire."
Ooops... got cut off by your system... not running MT are you?
But further down in the same thread, somebody posing as "Michael" revealed the likely truth:
"As for Z, I think you’re being sent up. It looks to me like Raphael finds the whole idea of a large and growing script to block spambots rather amusing and thinks it will be ultimately ineffective. You may not like it, but this is legitimate criticism in the form of satire."
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/02/26/how_to_block_spambots_ban_spybots_and_tell_unwanted_robots_to_go_to_hell#c000464
@Zoe: come on, the beach is boring, let's discuss a little bit ;-) actually i do that only very infrequently...
@Zoe: sorry, i also didn't catch the satiric part, maybe my english is too poor... whatever!
I always wondered about the "save Mark" thingy but didn't care as i did not use Zoe's rss features.
Re: the beach is boring
Hehe... you are right...
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.mail.zoe.general/2288
We've only just hit Spring here. It won't be beach weather for at least another month. I'm really, really getting sick of Winter: my apartment faces pretty much due West, so it gets Really Fucking Cold in the mornings.
Moving back to less important matters. With jokes, one generally expects humour to be involved. Or failing humour, you can always fall back on puns.
If there's humour there, it's one of those in-jokes that totally baffles the independent observer. Perhaps I'm being hopelessly un-funny when I expect software developers not to put arbitrary blocks in their code on some kind of bizarre whim.
Do you also block sending mail to users/developers of SpamAssassin? After all, they're maintaining an ever-growing list of regexps to combat spam...
Anyway, this is a moot point because I don't want to be a user of Zoe, and I'm sure that nobody working on Zoe wants me as a user by now. :)
It's sort of the same reason I don't use qmail or djbdns. They're wonderful pieces of software, but my life just is that little bit more relaxed because I know I'll never end up in a situation where I have to deal with Dan Bernstein.
Re: "I'm sure that nobody working on Zoe wants me as a user by now. "
On the contrary, "we" would love to have you on board :) And "we" are not taking any of your enfantillage as a mortal personal attack... But... because there is always a but... you should really start working on those social skills of yours...
In any case, you are famous now:
http://zoe.nu/itstories/story.php?data=stories&dmm=y&num=24&sec=3
Cheers,
Z.
Hey. I only get fifteen minutes of fame, and you're using them up!
Re: fame
Yep. Sorry about that. On the other hand, consider yourself lucky as you have fifteen minutes to burn. The rest of us only have five...
I recently grabbed the newest version of ZOE. For whatever reason, they still have a quote of yours on the download page. The quote is negative of their project, so I am slightly confused.
http://zoe.nu/itstories/story.php?data=stories&num=24&sec=3
They have all but alienated me, b/c of their lack of documentation and horrible website.
There is http://zoe.omara.ca/ now so some documentation now exists.