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 <
http://www.tux.org/lkml/#s3-7>, 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 <
http://www.billjonas.com/tmp/plug.png>
-- 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:
<
http://lists.plug.phoenix.az.us/lurker/list/plug-discuss.html>. ;-)
--
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