On 6/23/05, Karl A. Krueger kkrueger@whoi.edu wrote:
On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 04:43:37AM -0700, thomas-edison@ziplip.com wrote:
Mailing lists are just so inefficient.... why not just have a forum?
Mailing lists (and newsgroups) have some real advantages over Web forums.
First off, everyone gets to choose what software they want to use to read mail in, whereas a Web forum means that everyone has to use the same software (namely, the forum software itself) even if it doesn't fit their needs. If you want to read a mailing list in a Web browser, you can use the Web archives (as you linked) or use a Webmail system such as Gmail. But those of us who want to read the list in a dedicated mail client like mutt or Thunderbird can do that too. We can apply spam-filters to the list traffic to block out an unwanted thread if we like. We can get digest mode. We can use a real text editor to compose messages, not a browser TEXTAREA widget. So a mailing list offers more choices.
Second, most Web forum software has *remarkably poor* support for a lot of really basic discussion features, such as threading, quoting, and catching-up. Considering that the idea of threaded online discussions has been around for a couple of decades now (Usenet is 25 this year), you'd think that someone who was going to implement it anew would learn from (say) mail clients and Usenet newsreader software? But no, not particularly. Most forum software groups messages into "topics", not threads -- distinguished by the fact that a "topic" has a single root message and doesn't fork. Real discussions, of course, *do* fork, so Web forums poorly model the behavior of their users. Moreover, "topics" get unwieldy after 50 or so messages, leading forum administrators to pound on their users to "start a new topic" because the old one is "full". Huh? A thread doesn't get full.
Also, how is it that Web forum software such as phpBB and DCForum can get so popular without having something as basic as a feature to reliably catch up on unread messages, or to view messages sorted by different criteria? Sure, there's usually a feature to see which topics *have* unread messages, but when there's a dozen topics each of 100+ posts, catching up across the whole forum is slow and irritating. In contrast, every mail client in the world can tell you which messages you've read and which you haven't -- and many can distinguish "message that has been presented to you in the message list, but you never actually looked at" from "message that you have never seen at all before".
-- Karl A. Krueger kkrueger@whoi.edu
For once, this is on-topic. I would recommend Gmail for mailing lists. Personally, I like keeping WikiEN and other reasonably high-volume mailing lists away from my primary email account.
Also, the threading, while not perfect, is great for a web based system, and the automatic/user-controlled collapsing/expansion of quoted text is fantastic. Ditto for read messages in the thread - all available while reading the most recent messages.
One never has to worry about deleting messages or unwanted threads either (it's no harm to just leave it - as you'll never run out of space!) Also the search facility is very prompt compared to in-client searching of downloaded mail.
I found it to be a good way of experiencing Gmail whilst not wanting to use Gmail for my personal mail.
Zoney