As i recommended to tomos, phpbb is the best open source (GNU) out there (phpbb.com). I will use their bb to illustrate counterpoints:
--- 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. backups?
- Archives like the ones generated by Mailman can be imported into email
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
- 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.
http://phpbb.com/phpBB/search.php?search_author=theFinn
- 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...
- 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.
- 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.
- Bulletin board systems are slow. This is related to 4) -- in a BBS I
have to wait for each individual thread to load, for the "post reply" screen to load, for sorting options to affect my display etc. -- as with all web interfaces, you have a high additional latency as every aspect of the interface is generated "on demand".
I agree flat out.
- 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
- 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
- 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...
Now its my turn.
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.
as you can see from http://phpbb.com/phpBB/ there are 500,000 articles, well more than wikipedia ;-) and 160 users online at the time im writing this. you tell me of the performance?
However, if we can find a file-based bb that allows structure and is well developed, then that would be ideal.
Im also not aggressively inclined toward having a bbs, i just wanted to shed some light.
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