On Wed, 2002-12-11 at 14:55, The Cunctator wrote:

On Wed, 2002-12-11 at 17:45, Brion Vibber wrote:

...

On Wed, 2002-12-11 at 14:36, The Cunctator wrote:

...

At least 90% of our problems would be solved, without adding hierarchies and censorship, if we just moved to a bulletin board system.

What are the problems that this would solve, and how would it solve them?

It would solve the basic scaling problems

• the problem of flooded inboxes

Present solution: Filter your mailbox; put lists in their own folders. (But not everyone has a mailreader that does filtering, or knows how to set it up if they do.)

• the problem of lack of threading

Present solution: Use a threaded mailreader. (But not everyone has a mailreader that does threading, or knows has to turn it on if they do.)

• the problem of ephemerality of content (by making it easy to refer to

earlier threads)

Present solution: Hyperlink to the archives on the web; most mailreaders these days will let you click on a URL. (But it's harder to reply to the original post; it's hard to search the archives; URLs are long.)

These scaling problems underlie the current tensions causing the upswells of conflict on the lists.

If the bbs were integrated with the Wikipedia system (that is, it recognized users and/or allowed people to make wiki links) it would solve

• the problem of obscurity and

Not sure what you mean here -- perhaps easier ability to link from Wikipedia pages to particular threads in the bbs? How so?

• the problem of not being able to link directly to [[Wikipedia]]

Now, that _would_ be nice.

• the problem of not being able to coordinate Talk page discussion with

list-based discussions

I'm not sure how the bbs helps here. It's trivial to include a URL to a talk page in a list message, and URLs to bbs threads are about as obscure as URLs to the mailing list archive.

A web board is also inimical to offline reading (as is the 'pedia, at present) and doesn't integrate well with people who have an organized way to deal with massive amounts of e-mail. Possible solution: smtp<->bbs or nntp<->bbs gateway.

There's some potential here though; feel free to set up a page on meta with some specific proposals.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)