On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 07:51:18PM -0700, Terry Lynch wrote: > I hope I didn't get off on the wrong foot with you guys with my first > post, :-( . Not at all. To me, it was a simple question-and-answer exchange -- you asked why we do it this way instead of another way. Then I replied and told you why I prefer a mailing list as a way to answer your question. No offense intended. > However, every forum site I've seen will allow you to be notified of > activity at whatever level you wish to subscribe to - with a hyperlink > to the new post or changed section - which you can then read without > logging in, unless you wish to reply. I tend to leave my browser running for weeks at a time and tend not to log out of web sites even if I *do* close the browser for some reason on my home system, so logging in is not the problem for me, unless the site in question enforces a timeout. As for being emailed a notification with a link when there's a new post... doesn't that turn it into a mailing list, basically? > I'll also grant you that the subscriber base here is rather small, > perhaps there wouldn't be the traffic necessary to sustain a thriving > forum based community. I don't think it's a matter of traffic. There are some very low-traffic fora out there (AuntEthelsKnittingBlog.com, to take a (probably) fictitious example), and some extremely high-traffic mailing lists. For example, linux-kernel -- the primary development mailing list for the Linux kernel -- carries a prodigious volume of messages. According to , there were nearly 300 messages per day a year ago, and that number is steadily rising. So after a few minutes of pondering what the difference is, I think I figured it out. In my opinion, a web-based forum seems to me to be the right choice for companies looking to provide a place to talk and who wish to make money (sell ads) since web advertising is established and familiar, and for providing a place to post stories where people can leave comments (like Slashdot or LiveJournal). A mailing list seems to me to be the right choice... well, in cases other than those. In my opinion. > It seems to me that if folks will wade through these e-mails then they > would happily replace that effort with a simple login and the ability > to selectively browse threads, threads which would have a bit more > persistence than these. For me, it's no effort. My mail is automatically filtered into various mailboxes; plug-discuss gets its own folder. My mail client notifies me when there's new mail in it. When I want to read it, I go to the folder and and can see more-or-less at a glance which threads have new messages in them. (For an example, see -- your message is ready to read, and I can just hit tab to go to the next new message.) I can choose to read messages, delete them, reply to them (privately or to the list), forward them, mangle, chop, fold, spindle, mutilate, stir, fry, etc. And they are *very* persistant. If I don't delete them, they stay there. I tend not to delete list mail in case I want to refer back to it -- I have all the mail on plug-discuss going back to when I first subscribed in October 2002. From another mailing list, I have archives dating back to September 2000. > Sometimes I don't login to my favorite site, www.extremetech.com, for > several days but I know I can catch up whenever I want to and will be > able to easily follow the discussions. I didn't read plug-discuss for a period of a couple months, and all the emails are still there, although those are mostly unread still. ;-) > I guess it is the visually unappealing style of the e-mails that > bothers me most and a close second would be the fact that you cannot > see the whole thread as effectively as with a forum. There are mail clients that will give you a threaded display if you them to (I believe that Netscape Mail version 4 will do threads, so I would think that Thunderbird, being a fork of Mozilla Mail, being the successor to Netscape Mail) -- reference the earlier URL. As for the style... well, that's something that is highly subjective, so I can't argue with you there. I just feel that text is all that's really needed. > It makes my head hurt just looking at the messages with all the > "baggage" of the reply-to e-mail, which usually already contains 2 other > previously copied posts, just so that you can keep the thread intact; I think that this is a misunderstanding due to incorrect use of quoting. Quoting is supposed to be solely for context. (Insert reference to the joke about the boy who replies to his parents' letter at summer camp: "Hello Mom and Dad, I am doing fine. To answer your questions: Yes. No. Fun. Three times a day. Good. ...") Notice how I trim what I'm quoting of your message so that I'm quoting only that material to which I'm responding; to my eyes, it reads like a conversation. What I think you're probably referring to is when nothing at all's trimmed, and you get messages quoting the entire text of a previous message or five. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) > not to mention all the sigs and pgp keys and weird carriage returns etc > etc... (no offense intended, but they are visual annoyances, at least > to me). There's a lot of clutter to sift through to get to the payload. Again, it's a matter of style, so we probably won't convince each other. Some people, myself included, prefer to cryptographically sign emails. I'm not sure what you mean by weird carriage returns, but I presume you mean that most of us have the line wrap somewhere south of 80 characters. Again, it's a stylistic thing -- it's visually annoying for people reading their email on an 80-character wide screen (console or xterm) to have lines wrapped in the middle of words. > Probably I am just a whiny b*st*rd (who, by the way, has no web skills > to implement a forum on his own :-[ ) that > should have kept his gub shut. I'll now go back to "lurker" mode... Naw... I hope you didn't take offense at the tone (if I come across as an elitist SOB, that's not my intent), nor at the suggestion to set up a forum. The suggestion was simply because, in a nutshell, it's generally the way it's done in the Free/Open Software world -- the best person to scratch your itch is usually you. :-) Note that, if you'd prefer, you could think of this mailing list as simply an email posting interface to a web forum: . ;-) -- Bill Jonas * bill@billjonas.com * http://www.billjonas.com/ "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your front door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." -- Bilbo Baggins