Why you won't find me in the forum much

Rod Whitby rod at whitby.id.au
Wed Jul 25 23:01:32 CEST 2007


I have no problem with OpenMoko creating a forum for end users.

As a developer, I won't be going there regularly.  I might drop in now
and again to see what the signal to noise ratio is.

Why?

Simply because the only time of the day where I can spare 60 minutes to
catch up on project communications is on the bus to and from work.

With mailing lists, I can download *all* my mail and read (and respond)
to it offline on the bus.  I read (well, mostly delete) over 1000
messages per day from at least 10 different development mailing lists
via this method.

I have not yet found a forum that allows you to have all new messages
emailed to you, or to have *all* past messages since *exactly* the last
message you saw provided to you by an RSS feed (all the feeds I've seen
will give you the last N messages, or the last day's worth of messages,
so if I go away for three days it is not possible to see all the
messages I missed).

So when an official forum is blessed by someone, please make sure it is
a forum that has a *bidirectional* email gateway.  Anything else is
simply sub-standard for my usage patterns.

Note that nowhere in this message have I said that people should not
have a forum - I have my own personal opinions on that, but it's really
up to the OpenMoko core team to determine what the communication
pathways are for this project (that's why they are the core team - to
make decision like this where there is no clear and obvious technical
argument in one direction or the other).

-- Rod Whitby
-- MokoMakefile author




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