Taming the mailing lists?

[M. Fioretti]

On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 11:54:49 AM -0500, Mikha ben Avraham (mikhame at sbcglobal.net) wrote:

> Personally, I prefer forums to mailing lists. Forums give the
> ability to seperate different categories of problems and discussion.

The same do mailing lists, if netiquette is respected.

> The major advantage I see for a forum compared to a mailing list is that 
> a forum is more of a "browsing" medium, and mailing list just stuff 
> everything down your throat. I want to check what sort of software 
> problems people have, but to do so with a mailing list is intimidating 
> (when I didn't check my email for a few days and found over a thousand 
> emails, I certainly didn't read them all).
> 

Uh? Sorry, what is the difference between looking at a thousand
messages inside your email client window and the same thousand
messages inside your browser window? And who ever said that you are
forced to read every email you receive?

Maybe you meant to say that since forum may offer predefined subjects/
areas, they pre-sort clueless postings a bit better (visually
speaking) than a mailing list. Even in that case, however, if you
follow ten different forums, you'll save much more time when they are
all reformatted to one single interface that *you* chose (email client)
than jumping back and fort among the same number of sites designed
with ten different intervaces.

Forums are OK for casually following one or two subjects, not for
heavy usage in many areas. A corollary of this is that people with the
greatest expertise, who may help newbies more, won't waste time on
forums, but prefer mailing lists.

Ciao,
	Marco Fioretti


-- 
Marco Fioretti                 m.fioretti, at the server inwind.it
Red Hat for low memory         http://www.rule-project.org/en/

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