Don't get me wrong: developers of PHPBB & Co. are doing a good job -- but for our purposes, email is a much better solution.
-+- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
- Mailing lists are, by their very nature, decentralized. Any post is
replicated on hundreds of machines. This automatic replication makes censorship very hard and a total loss of data unlikely.
Whatever. paranoia.
You wouldn't say that if you had seen archives of hundreds of your posts disappear without prior notice -- not necessarily out of malice, maybe the bandwidth bill simply got too high. Mailing lists provide protection against such incidents. Even if you no longer have copies, one of the hundreds of subscribers will.
- Archives like the ones generated by Mailman can be imported into
clients and searched locally at high speed. I have frequently made use of that feature to build high quality archives. The search function of most BBS systems, on the other hand, is far from optimal (I've seen many BBS which claimed to have a search, but where this search never worked).
phpbb is solid and well tested for years now: http://phpbb.com/phpBB/search.php
Doesn't counter my main argument -- you have to rely on a central server for search, which is much slower and usually has less features, and when it isn't available, you can't search.
- Mailing lists keep a track record. It is easy and fast to see all posts
by a particular member, or everything written by yourself. With a BBS, you first have to figure out if such a feature exists, then wait for the server to perform some search. Server is down? Too bad, you'll never get that post you wrote 3 months ago now.
Doesn't counter the argument above.
- Mailing lists allow everyone to participate without a free online
connection. In many developing nations, Internet access is paid by the minute, and reading and replying to posts online costs money. Mailing lists can be conveniently read, responded to and archived offline.
you can 'watch' topics via email with phpbb. And i could easily hack in a reply-via-email option. There are many bbs/mailing lists out there...
Doesn't counter the argument above -- working offline is inevitably less convenient with a web-based solution.
- Mailing lists allow the use of a variety of email clients which all
have advantages and disadvantages. Everyone can use the software of their choice, with a user interface that suits them, without being forced to make use of an arbitrary web interface. This is of importance to handicapped users, for whom special email clients exist.
and special web-browsers....you wouldnt believe how much complaint of "aural" goes on in the mozilla.
Sure, but this is a big difference: An aural or braille web browser will read to the user everything that is on the screen in the order in which it appears on the page. Depending on the UI, this can make it very, very hard to navigate within a page. An aural email client is tailored for that specific purpose, all navigational elements are *part* of the aural interface. And let's not forget that a single button without an ALT tag can make a web UI unusable ..
- Good email clients make quoting and threading transparent and easy
to use. They interpret the reference ID in a message and thereby allow you to quickly navigate to the parent post that a message has responded to. Quoting and writing within a real text editor is also a lot more convenient than writing within a browser window.
http://phpbb-hpmods.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/posting.php?mode=reply&t=34
Thats my bb on sourceforge for a patch i made a while ago... try the [quote] feature, its quite clean.
Not as clean and fast as email, sorry. And yet another interface the user has to learn.
- Bulletin board systems have a higher noise level. They allow no easy
client-side filtering, as many email clients do. Many BBS encourage the use of fonts, pictures, animated smileys, overlong signatures etc., often leading to very hard to read threads.
A good administrator of phpbb can produce very clean sites. Its very configurable and skinable
And it's yet another problem you don't have to worry about when using a list.
- Every BBS is different. Everyone is familiar with email, but
learning to use a BBS always requires making yourself familiar with its particular user interface and functionality.
You must not have heard of phpbb...it has quite an active development community both on the web, and on irc.freenode.net #phpbb
What does this have to do with the above? Whether an individual BB has an active community is irrelevant, it is still just one of many systems out there.
- Mailing lists can be easily moderated, even in groups. BBS usually
have after-the-fact moderation, where individual posts are censored or threads are locked. On a mailing list, posts can be pre-approved and individual members banned. With a BBS that does not use some ID confirmation method, we'll have the same banning problem we have on Wikipedia proper -- totally open access is not always a good thing. And if email confirmation is required, this only advantage of a web-based BBS goes away.
??? wikipedia has groups, individual user permissions, and IP based blacklisting...
IP-blacklisting is unreliable because most IPs are dynamically assigned. It is also only available for non signed in users in the current configuration. Groups? Wikipedia has no groups. It also has no "individual user permissions" besides a simple is_sysop flag.
phpbb allows for structure of topics. This would easily allow it to become the talk section for each article on top of its other duties.
What a nightmare! The talk section for articles within a completely different system -- no more wiki style refactoring, no more proper archiving, no more single user experience. Thanks, but no thanks. Not that the talk pages cannot use improvement -- they would certainly benefit from some BBS-style functionality. But the wiki nature needs to be preserved.
as you can see from http://phpbb.com/phpBB/ there are 500,000 articles, well more than wikipedia ;-)
"Me too" is not an article. Have you counted the individual comments on all of Wikipedia's Talk pages? I thought not.
and 160 users online at the time im writing this. you tell me of the performance?
I haven't said anything about the performance other than about web- inherent latency, but now I will: The performance of a BBS is tied directly and fundamentally to the speed and availability of a central server. As you may have noticed, our central servers aren't exactly in the best form right now. A mailing list requires very little overhead -- no database, no webserver, just a script that tells the mailer daemon what to do. It could be run on a 233 Mhz PC. A PHP bulletin board on our main server will slow other Wikipedia processes down.
Im also not aggressively inclined toward having a bbs, i just wanted to shed some light.
Where there's light there is darkness ..
Regards,
Erik