Bill (William) Triest wrote:
> Second of all, would it be appropriate to see if official forums could
> be devised to replace the mailing lists? New users should already be
> familiar with a forum system, so I don't see that it would be much
> harder for them. Yet forums would seem to fix many of these problems.
> If people want to complain about bandwidth, then they can choose not to
> view a thread. If the message is screened properly, html shouldn't hurt
> it (or only allow bbcode etc). Signing up for an account is a little
> bit of a hassle, but its really no worse then signing up for a mailing
> list. With a proper search feature, I think they are just as useful.
I don't want to contribute to the main flame war. I would, however, like
to say that I personally would find a web-based system much harder to
use.
I find that mailing lists and newsgroups are much easier to handle (with
the right equipment) than web-based systems, especially with high-volume
lists like this.
And for me, Unix based systems, with their text-oriented scriptability,
are the Right Equipment. At the speed I go, I spend a lot of my time
waiting for the interface on web-enabled fora, and I can't change them
to do what I want them to do. I like sub-second switching between
messages and posts: waiting ten seconds for a page seriously disrupts
the flow.
(To begin with, too many web fora don't make a distinction between
"read" and "unread", and those that do tend to display thirty posts at a
time, and consider that you've necessarily read all of them).
So yes, allow people access to these lists as forums. I've lost count of
the number of ways one can post to them. But give me something that I
can run locally and script.
James.
--
E-mail address: james | I suppose if one has to go mad, slowly is the way to
@westexe.demon.co.uk | go. You wouldn't want to rush going mad, you might
| miss some of the good bits.
| -- Paul Tomblin
