On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 02:19:22AM -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote: > On Feb 6, 2005, Gain Paolo Mureddu <gmureddu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > [I] have never had any trouble with say V-Bulletin (yeah, I know > > their fame) message boards, even on some servers with as high > > traffic as our list here. I guess it's up to the site admins to set > > a good set of options for archiving and a good search tool (with an > > *SQL backend most probably) to make it easy for the users to find > > what they're looking for. > > If the main issue is to enable users to find answers to questions that > have been answered before, a good search engine in the mailing list > archives would be fine. > > But people willing to help can't easily keep track of new questions > yet to be answered, how are we ever going to create the good, > searchable archive of answered questions? > > Web forums are just too time-consuming if you want to have the choice > of keeping up with everything that is discussed in a forum. > Downloading the entire forum in background and then skimming through > the threads and reading whatever looks interesting without having to > wait a few seconds to download the contents of whatever > topic/thread/message you choose to read, is far more efficient than > clicking on a topic/thread/message, waiting a few seconds until it's > displayed and then reading its contents in just as many seconds. > > > Warren's posting focuses on part of the problem, namely, that of > creating a good environment for people to find help with problems they > run into. I believe a good searchable web front-end to any forum (be > it e-mail, news or your typical web forum) could accomplish just that. > > The other important part of the problem is to help people willing to > help answer questions. I doubt any web forum interface would enable > people willing to help to do so efficiently and effectively, and > without those answers, the web forum would be just a board on which > people would post questions and not get answers. In order to be > efficient for the helpers, a web forum would have to have a gateway to > e-mail and/or news, so as to enable helpers to remove the latency of > web interactions, and let them (err, us? :-) organize the information > that is most suitable to them. And if there's a gateway to e-mail > and/or news, e-mail and/or news might as well be a first-class entry > point to the forum, just as much as the corresponding web forum. > > Web forums just force you into a specific form to display and access > information. They're intrinsically against the principles behind Free > Software, that are meant to enable you to modify the software in > whatever way suits you best. Web forums that offer the information in > forms meant for other programs to handle, in the form of web services, > XML-RPC, whatever, will let you do that, but they require people to > reinvent wheels not only on the server side, but also on client sides, > because good, threaded mail/news reading programs are unlikely to > support such custom web forum protocols. I.e., you lose no matter how > you look at web forums. > > -- I just want to second what has been said above. This proposed switch is just a bad idea. -- ======================================================================= I consider a new device or technology to have been culturally accepted when it has been used to commit a murder. -- M. Gallaher ------------------------------------------- Aaron Konstam Computer Science Trinity University One Trinity Place. San Antonio, TX 78212-7200 telephone: (210)-999-7484 email:akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxx
