Re: Re: A forum is better than a mailing list??

["Csaba Varga" <csaboka@(domain hidden)>]

>  Certainly.  I use a newsreader and I don't need to swap to a zillion
>  different websites to follow various forums.  Also requires a lot less
>  mouse-clicking.  The same is possible with e.g. thunderbird.

You seem to be following a lot of different discussions, and I can
accept that it is easier with mailing lists. Most people, however,
don't follow zillions of discussions, so they have to cope with only
few web forums. On the other hand, people prefer to reserve their
mailboxes for messages they're interested in, especially if they don't
have much storage space in their inbox. (Plus, if I attach a 1MB
attachment to one of my forum posts, no one will complain, people who
don't need it just don't download it. Try attaching a 1MB file to an
e-mail...)

If you have said that you personally prefer mailing lists, I would
have just accepted that. But you've said that web forums will never be
better than mailing lists, and this doesn't seem to be the case. Just
look at all the people happily using TT-Forums. Why aren't they asking
for a dozen mailing lists instead of the forum?

And why was this mailing list silent for a year, while TTDPatch
discussion was happily going on the TT-Forums? By your logic, people
would have abandoned the webforum to use the superior mailing list...

>  If you use threading, you can ignore threads and you mark entire threads
>  as read.

I would still need to enable the ignore function for every new thread
I'm not interested in. While on a web forum, well, I just ignore those
threads.

>  I subscribe to maybe 40-50 mailing lists, of which I actively read maybe
>  20 or 25 every day.  Not everything of course.  If I had to swap from
>  one website every time I wanted to see if a list had any updates, I'd
>  never finish.

That's why topic reply notifications were invented. If a topic you're
interested in gets a new reply, you get an e-mail about it. There are
no new notifications until you visit the topic, so you won't get
zillion copies of the same mail for a popular topic.

>  Here's a screenshot from my newsreader:
>  http://jessen.ch/files/knode-screenshot2.jpeg
>
>  Can you produce a similar overview for your forums?

Why would I need to? (And they're not _my_ forums, mind you. I'm just
a member.) The opening page shows you which forums (the rough
equivalent of a mailing list) have new replies, and I don't really
care about the amount of unread posts, just about whether there is
something new. And a web forum doesn't need a threading feature,
because users manage threads explicitly.

I repeat: I can understand if you dislike webforums. Just don't
pretend that the whole word agrees with you on that.

Regards
Csaba Varga

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