* Sterling Christensen sterling.christensen@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