Jeff Vian wrote:
How about the ability to post/read/respond to messages even when you're not at your own computer? Many people on Yahoo Groups, for instance, don't even have a computer at home and access their groups from works or library computers. To my mind, this is probably the most important advantage a forum has over an email list.
David Shaw
Web mail accounts such as yahoo or msn and the like do not tie you to your home computer either.
Indeed - but many offices and libraries firewall such sites. And they all have a fairly limited capacity.
Personally, I like the way Yahoo Groups does it - it's effectively an email list, but with a relatively effective web interface within which I can usually find relevant archived posts within a couple of minutes.
The Wine-users etc. archives, on the other hand, I find totally impenetrable and impossible to find relevant posts from the past in any reasonable amount of time.
I'm not knocking those who designed it, I'm sure that, to them, it's totally transparent and the easiest system in the world to use - I know, I've designed Grud alone knows how many forms, all of which have made perfect sense to me, but many of which have extracted the response 'Eh?!' from the intended users and I feel this is probably the same kind of situation :-)
Fora (posh, eh ;-> ) and email lists each have their pros and cons and those who like one tend to dislike the other. I feel this is a debate which is never going to reach a conclusion which will satisfy everyone (emacs or vi? Mac or PC? Anyone? ;-> ) so all I will say further on the matter is this - *please* add a search function to the archives and then at least *I'll* be happy :-)
David Shaw