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

[Sterling Christensen]

Lots of forums support RSS, and you can "subscribe" to a topic - two
ways for forum posts to come to you.

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.

Mailing lists are searchable, but harder than a forum to search.
Forums let you search by any of text, title, author, date, category,
etc.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Forum admins can lock (prevent replies to) a topic that's turned into
a really bad flamewar.