7 Mar
2005
7 Mar
'05
7:23 a.m.
At 08:51 AM 3/7/2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
I prefer the flow and linearity of a mailing list. I
like to consume
everything and discard what I don't care for. With a web forum, it's more
difficult to keep track of new messages being posted. And with the
incredible level of topic drift here, it's not entirely evident what's
being discussed in any particular thread based on the title. You might
miss something you would be interested in or be helpful with.
Ah, good - some reasonable discussion on the notion, as opposed to
just saying "poopie".
I agree with what you say about the pleasure of accidental
discovery. With a mailing list with wandering topics, where
you're "forced" to read most messages, you learn things you didn't
know. On the other hand, I don't think that would be impossible
on a web forum. Just have one forum and read all the postings.
And I agree that forums have a different "feel" than mailing lists.
Mailing lists are more "classic". Many of us may have decades of
experience with them, and only a few years of comparable experience
with web forums.
But it would also be cool to have machine- and topic- specific forums.
Find a web forum that acts like a mailing list and
I'll buy in ;)
http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/ seems to be down
temporarily, and does it only update every 24 hours?
Has no one invented a web forum / mailing list hybrid, where web
postings are echoed to the mailing list, and vice versa, and it
updates in real-time or something close to it? If some large
percentage of subscribers switched to this web version, it would
certainly lessen the load on the SMTP-based list.
- John