Re: [Sheflug] Use of mailing lists and online forums

[Chris J <cej@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Beaumont wrote:
> It is good to see some small support for online forums from a question I
> knew would illicit a bit of a circlejerk over mailing lists.
> 
> I visit the Ubuntu forums every day and rather enjoy the community
> there. The sheer amount of posts per minute would make a mockery of
> keeping track of a mailing list. Where is this extra effort in visiting
> your favourite forums everyday? I open firefox, all my sites are
> immediately there on the toolbar, and I can browse at my leisure without
> having to store hundreds of thousands of posts (in Ubuntu's case
> millions) locally.

The main problem I have with web-based forums is that navigation is a pain 
and can be slow. Mail servers can be quick and flexible, but mail clients 
can vary in how well they deal with lists (when it comes to options like 
threading and scoring, especially with high-traffic).

This is mostly because I'm used to following a lot of forums via the 
old-fashioned, but perfectly functional Usenet in a text based news-reader, 
where navigation is along the lines of 
<down><down><ENTER>n(pause)n(pause)q(browse). Which for me is a lot quicker 
to naviagate and process the information compared to web-based forums.

That said, NNTP, despite its age can do the job. NNTP supports threading 
natively whereas threading support in mail can still be patchy. And I've 
never come across a forum where threads are easy to follow without clicking 
multiple times.

NNTP can be online or offline (via something like leafnode[1]), either with 
a dedicated reader (trn, pan, thunderbird) or via a web-interface front-end 
to the news server: on this latter I've implemented any personally but 
there seem to be some ideas listed here[2]. The Google Groups interface is 
a prime example of a (mostly) good web-front end to Usenet.

> 
> Both formats are useful and have a place. Sheflug wouldn't work as a
> forum, it would receive low traffic and appear dead at times.
> Ubuntu-security-announce is a godsend of a list. But I would prefer the
> higher traffic sites to remain as huge publc archive forums. Can anyone
> see somethingawful forums being successful as a mailing list? Nor can I.
> 

High-traffic mailing lists, yes, become a management problem. But I'd argue 
the same for forums as well, although I've seen a lot of it come on quite a 
way over the past couple of years.

If I had a choice, I'd favour setting up a news-server and giving people 
the choice of how to access. It might be a little bit more work, but it 
gives the end user more choice in how they access the forum. If setting up 
a private server, this can be behind a firewall implementing NNTP AUTH to 
make sure no strangers get in; groups can remain unmoderated, and people 
can pull local copies down and set up their stuff to ignore moderator cancels.

Just my 2p :-)

Chris...

[1] http://leafnode.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.newsreaders.com/web/software.html

-- 
\ Chris Johnson                 \
  \ cej@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx          \ Quidquid latin dictum sit altum viditur
   \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  \
    \ http://redclaw.org.uk/        ~--------------------------------------



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