[Wine] Re: Sum-up: Re-proposal: web forums

[Kai Blin]

* Sterling Christensen <sterling.christensen at gmail.com> [22/04/06, 16:10:06]:
> Lots of forums support RSS, and you can "subscribe" to a topic - two
> ways for forum posts to come to you.

Which will fill my mailbox just like a mailing list does, just that it
only says "Someone replied to your forum post. Go <long URL> to see the
post" instead of giving me the post right away.

> 
> There are lots of people who prefer forums. Everything seems so much
> easier to me with a proper modern forum. There is so much that's just
> impossible on a mailing list.

This doesn't really seem like a point that is helping. Assume I reply
with "There are lots of people who prefer mailing lists."

...

> You can't cancel or edit posts. Forum moderators can delete spam
> posts. On a mailing list, once spam gets though to my mailbox it's too
> late for a moderator to delete it.

I've seen deleted forum entries only by people who started a flame out
of sheer stupidity and then, when they realized that they were wrong
deleted the post, leaving only the replies. I would hope that this sort
of thing wouldn't happen for a wine forum anyway.

That being said, forums seem to get many more people who are too lazy to
look for the information. If I need to sign up to a mailing list to ask
a question, I can as well read the FAQ first.

As for the spam, I do have a moderator for my mailbox called
spamassassin...

> Mailing lists can be categorized, but then you have to subscribe to
> each category individually - hence all user discussion being lumped
> together into "wine-users" instead of being subcategorized.

That's why most email client have an option to use threads (google mail
calls it conversations(beta)). If you are not interested in a thread,
you can just delete it without reading.

> 
> Forums puts quoted text in a nice colored box so you can tell
> unmistakably at a glance. You quote people with greater-than symbols -
> so I can't as quickly distinguish message text from quoted text and
> it's ugly. Your probably used to it, but we're not.

Forums make it hard to correctly quote when replying to lots of things
in one post. You're probably used to it, but...

> Forum admins can give people badges and/or titles to make it clear
> who's a developer. And you can see anyone's posting history. On a
> mailing list you can only sometimes tell by email address or
> signature.

Does it really matter if the person who fixes your problem is a
developer? We're talking about a user forum. For wine-devel I care who's
a developer. But if you're reading wine-patches/wine-cvs and wine-devel,
that's easy to find out, too.

> Forum admins can lock (prevent replies to) a topic that's turned into
> a really bad flamewar.
 
I agree that this feature can be handy.

A lot of pro-forum arguments can be used as pro-mailing list arguments,
depending on what the author prefers to use.

Cheers,
Kai

-- 
Kai Blin, (blin at gmx dot net)
Reapply as necessary.