Why you won't find me in the forum much

Nick Johnson arachnid at notdot.net
Thu Jul 26 11:51:28 CEST 2007


This is hardly terribly complicated: Just have an email address per
forum. You can subscribe to a list for each (sub)forum, and to post
you just email the appropriate address.

-Nick Johnson

On 7/26/07, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns at computer.org> wrote:
> 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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