On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 11:54:49 AM -0500, Mikha ben Avraham (mikhame@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > Personally, I prefer forums to mailing lists. Forums give the > ability to seperate different categories of problems and discussion. The same do mailing lists, if netiquette is respected. > The major advantage I see for a forum compared to a mailing list is that > a forum is more of a "browsing" medium, and mailing list just stuff > everything down your throat. I want to check what sort of software > problems people have, but to do so with a mailing list is intimidating > (when I didn't check my email for a few days and found over a thousand > emails, I certainly didn't read them all). > Uh? Sorry, what is the difference between looking at a thousand messages inside your email client window and the same thousand messages inside your browser window? And who ever said that you are forced to read every email you receive? Maybe you meant to say that since forum may offer predefined subjects/ areas, they pre-sort clueless postings a bit better (visually speaking) than a mailing list. Even in that case, however, if you follow ten different forums, you'll save much more time when they are all reformatted to one single interface that *you* chose (email client) than jumping back and fort among the same number of sites designed with ten different intervaces. Forums are OK for casually following one or two subjects, not for heavy usage in many areas. A corollary of this is that people with the greatest expertise, who may help newbies more, won't waste time on forums, but prefer mailing lists. Ciao, Marco Fioretti -- Marco Fioretti m.fioretti, at the server inwind.it Red Hat for low memory http://www.rule-project.org/en/ "The SUN TROPIC beauty farm reopens today: featuring exotic swimming pools, and, under the palm trees, **UVA lamps**" (unluckily for humankind, a REAL ad that I read in a real magazine)
