[Coco] Mailing lists vs web forums (was: OS-9 Book)

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 1:47 AM, Lothan <lothan at newsguy.com> wrote:
> From: "Stephen H. Fischer" <SFischer1 at Mindspring.com>
>
>> There are more reasons that the world is going to web based forums, but
>> then
>> those who also use them know why already.
>
> There are also good reasons I dislike using web-based forums. Web forums
> can't track what I have read vs. what I have not read; at best, they record
> the last message I read or the last message that existed at the time I last
> logged on. Many web forums don't even track what I've read so it can be
> difficult keeping up with conversations in multiple threads.
>
> Most web forums present flat threads so it can be difficult to track
> individual threads of thought and long threads can be scattered across 10 or
> more web pages, thereby making it even more difficult to keep up with the
> last posts in each thread.
>
> There's also the issue of advertisements and ad tracking in web forums that
> you typically don't get in a mailing list or newsgroup. The one you
> mentioned for example is tracked by Google AdSense, Chikita, and Quantcast.
>
>

I'm involved with a few open source projects and monitor activity on
several more.  All of them use mailing lists instead of web based
forums.   Some of these are high profile, modern projects.  I don't
see web forums replacing the mailing list any time soon.

To me, a mailing list is vastly superior to a web forum.  Instead of
visiting a dozen or so web pages just to know what is going on, I
simply open my email.  I could organize messages in any fashion that
I'd like with simple inbox rules (I don't, never saw much point in
organizing my inbox :).  I can forward a message to someone not on the
list directly from my email client, I can reply directly to someone
rather than publicly just as easily, I use whatever editor I like to
compose my messages, I can search years of content that spans several
projects *and* my direct correspondence in one place, etc.

If you are involved in many projects, mailing lists are the only way to go.

There are some hybrid web + email things that might make everyone
happy (if we are unhappy to begin with? :).  Actually the yahoo CoCo
group is an example of this.  I've never quite understood how that
ties to our list, seems we see their traffic but they don't see ours?
Google Groups gets good reviews, and I've had no issues with it on the
one project I'm part of that uses it, but this requires you to have a
google account, I suppose yahoo groups have a similar limitation.

-Aaron

>
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>