Re: Taming the mailing lists?

M. Fioretti wrote:

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?

The difference is as you talk about below: predefined subject categories. Also, it takes less time for me to load a forum then it does for me to download my email. I'm on DSL and it still loads faster.

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.

For the most part, if you want the simple functions of view topic->reply to topic then all the major forum software will function in the same manner with nearly the same interface.

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

Another corollary could just be personal preference. I can imagine that for the most part, the people helping the newbies out are old-timers that either "learned the internet" when forums weren't either availiable or popular (I'm 18, so perhaps I am mistaken on this, so it's just a guess), or simply prefer the interface over the normal forum interface.

Look at it this way, I can register a username in fedoraforum.org and automatically I have access to the same things people suggest to do with mailing lists: predefined subject categories. They would certainly taim mailing lists, as they do forums. But a newbie to both mailing lists and forums will find learning a forum to be easier than mailing lists. A newbie does not have to subscribe to multiple mailing lists, just to one forum.

Furthermore, forums are found easier than mailing lists. "linux help" in google will bring up more forums than mailing list archives.

Forums have the biggest advantage for someone new to mailing lists and forums and to those who want less work finding what they want. Mailing lists have the biggest advantage for those who want everything in one interface so they don't need to relearn difference interfaces.