Why you won't find me in the forum much

ramsesoriginal ramsesoriginal at gmail.com
Thu Jul 26 09:34:43 CEST 2007


On 7/26/07, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns at computer.org> wrote:
>
> Am 26.07.2007 um 08:06 schrieb <marcus.3.fletcher at bt.com>:
>
> > "
> > ...
> > 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.
> > ...
> > "
> > -- Rod Whitby
> > -- MokoMakefile author
> >
> > Mail2Forum sounds like it could help:
> > http://mail2forum.com/forums/index.php
> >
> > "Mail2Forum (or M2F) is an add-on software to the phpBB forum system.
> > M2F combines the functionality of a mailing list system and a phpBB
> > forum in order to add bi-directional 'email to forum' and 'forum to
> > email' communication."
>
> I can hardly imagine how this really works?
>
> Firstly, please take a look at http://www.oesf.org/forums/ and count
> the subforums there.
>
> In a forum system you have main forums and subforums, i.e. tons of
> different boards where each one runs one or more threads (topics).
> Ususally you can subscribe to e-mail notifications for each subforum.
> This is the main benefit of a forum over a single e-mail list where
> everything is thrown in (compare between a large hall where everybody
> cries what he wants to say vs. a set of small rooms with special
> topics discussions).
>
> Now, should all new messages of all subfora be mapped to a single e-
> mail transmission? Or should each subforum have its own mailing list?
> For an unidrectional mode (forum -> list) this could work (even if
> new subfora are created).
>
> But how to respond? How do you want to specify to respond to e.g.
> "Developer", "Hardware", "Smalltalk", "First Aid", "Sell&Buy" etc.
> through E-Mail? Or even worse: how to create a new thread which
> should just go to a specific subforum. On the single mailing list you
> would simply drop it in between completely unrelated messages.
>
> My conclusions is that by this requirement "Anything else is simply
> sub-standard for my usage patterns. " some of the special usage
> patterns of a forum system have to be given up (i.e. the hierarchical
> grouping of different topics/rooms/subfora or however you will call it).
>
> For me, a single mailing list carrying all topics of everybody is
> "substandard"...
>
> And, another issue is IMHO substandard with mailing lists: it is the
> citation style - everybody has a different way of citing previous e-
> mails. This is a lot of waste of eye-movements to find the relevant
> references. A forum system forces to use a single citation style.
>
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>

i imagine this mail2forum provides some sort of "[Subforum]"-tag before each
e-mail. To answer to a thread, simply answer the last mail of that thread.
To start a new topic, just write "[Subforum]New Topic Name" as Subject of
the mail. At least i would implement it this way. And if it isn't so, we
could simply write ourselves something like that. I mean: we have plenty of
developers in here.
This not only allow to have mailing list AND forum, but also to let
everybody choose how they want to interact.

-- 
My corner of the web: http://ramsesoriginal.wordpress.com
My dream, my world: http://abenu.wordpress.com
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