I've been mostly silent in this discussion (partially because it's taken me two days to catch up on it), but I have some thoughts/questions.<br><br>The gist of the argument for email seems to be:<br>1. You can download all the messages and view them offline
<br>2. Standalone email clients group messages by who they replied to instead of grouping by subject line and then by date<br>3. Forums suck (in your opinion)<br><br>I understand that now, but I didn't before because:
<br>1. I use gmail and am always online<br>2. I use gmail, which does not group messages based on replies<br>3. I check several forums daily and don't think they suck<br><br>Forums work for me because:<br>1. I'm always online
<br>2. Forums have categories. So, I never check the hardware category because I don't do low-level stuff. I watch some other category closely reading every message closely (and reply to some). I occasionally check out the other catagories as well, but only if I have free time.
<br>3. If I post a question or response in a thread, I often have the forum notify me when there is a response. So, even if I don't have a lot of free time, I'll see an email come in saying someone has responded to something I'm directly involved in, so I will take a minute to see what the new message is.
<br>4. In a forum, you can edit a post and easily format your message (I could use HTML in an email, but seems like a lot of people here view email in plaintext and my HTML would just annoy them).<br><br><br>So, my questions:
<br>1. Is there a way to get Gmail to thread the messages based on who it was in response to?<br>2. Is there a way to get a mailing list with categories? So that I can see that a particular category and not worry about the other stuff? I thought that was the point of separate mailing lists, but I get messages ranging from questions on ordering and shipping the phone to problems setting up a build environment to marketing ideas to feature suggests etc. The traffic is getting unmanageably large. (perhaps you manage better than me. but I don't have time to sift through 20 threads with 5-50 responses every day). The result is that I delete entire threads based on the subject. I will probably miss valuable information that might have even been relevant to me because of this. Any ideas on how to reduce the traffic or make it more relevant?
<br><br>-Steven<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/24/07, <b class="gmail_sendername"><a href="mailto:kent@songbird.com">kent@songbird.com</a></b> <<a href="mailto:kent@songbird.com">kent@songbird.com</a>> wrote:
</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 10:45:32AM -0700, Daniel Robinson wrote:<br>> The fact that you are subscribed to 20 different mailing lists and you would
<br>> find it difficult to read all of that information on 20 different forum's<br>> is your issue, and it is not the responsibility of this community to<br>> address.<br><br>Probably it is. There are many people *in this community* in the same boat,
<br>and in general, those people will be the most knowledgeable and the most<br>valuable sources of information, since they will tend to be more technically<br>oriented, and be the most experienced internet users, and will be plugged in
<br>to more numerous sources of information (since email is indeed more efficient<br>for being connected to many different information sources).<br><br>> To state, axiomatically, that mailing lists are more efficient is to
<br>> attempt proof by assertion.<br><br>Not trying to "prove" something -- trying to give benefit of long experience<br>in similar situations. Email is substantially more efficient, because it is<br>intrinsically more powerful. For example:
<br><br>1) Essentially any functionality a forum can support can be supported by good<br>email clients -- threading, sorting (or categorization), searching,<br>restricted visibility. Converse isn't true (see below).<br>
<br>2) Forums cannot be viewed when you are offline, but email is a store and<br>forward protocol, and works perfectly with only occasional connections to<br>the internet -- you can read your email on a plane; you can't read a forum.
<br><br>3) A forum, and indeed any web-based application by definition, is fundamentally<br>restricted to the functions that can be provided by a browser. Web-based<br>email suffers the same restrictions, but email clients can make full use of
<br>the OS interface. And contrariwise, email also supports pure text-based<br>clients -- try using a text-based browser on typical forum applications for<br>an exercise in frustration.<br><br>4) With email, you get to pick what you want to keep and don't want to keep.
<br>With a forum you have no control -- garbage stays there unless removed by an<br>admin.<br><br>5) Email is accessible to a far larger population. Email supports both<br>web-based and client based interaction. It supports text and graphical UIs.
<br>It gives a decent user experience over less bandwidth. It works better<br>with mobile devices (eg blackberry).<br><br>6) Email has far better support for exchanging documents, media, and other<br>kinds of information. (Web interfaces have good support for *display*, but
<br>lousy support for *sending*.)<br><br>7) When you get really good at using a particular email client, that real<br>"down to the fingers" expertise generalizes to every email list. Forums use<br>different interfaces.
<br><br>Well, then, why not have forums for people who want them, and leave email<br>for people who don't want them? The thing is, it doesn't work very well in<br>practice. If experience is any guide, then the technically knowledgable
<br>people will use email, and won't waste much time on the forums. But a<br>project at the current stage of the openmoko project will require lots of<br>*technical* help for everyone, so what will happen is that you will have to
<br>follow the email lists anyway... I mean -- I could be wrong, but that's the<br>way things seem to go with this kind of project.<br><br>Kent<br><br>--<br>Kent Crispin<br>Technical Systems Manager<br>ICANN<br><br><br>
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