Joseph Garvin wrote:
They can bookmark forum posts.
Webmail interfaces are very popular but often suck at threading
mailing lists.
Good points.
- phpbb has become so widespread that signing up for a forum is
something that they know how to do and are familiar with.
- phpbb is so widespread that it's a familiar interface.
Bull, if you ask me.
Nobody will care whether it's phpBB or something that provides the exact same features and solutions. If anything, I think it's easy to point out a better direction than what phpBB does. You could start by stripping away the ugly theme, going minimalistic with icons and colors. And make it less clique-ish-prone.
- Subscribing to a mailing lists requires setting up filters so that
you're main inbox isn't flooded with posts.
- A forum has a throttleable amount of involvement. I don't want to
have to subscribe to a mailing list to just ask one question and then probably never participate again, and then have to go through the whole sign up process again on the off chance that I do have another question.
- Nobody whines when you attach large images or files.
Good points.
I like #7, haven't heard that one before :-).
- It is easily searchable, and unlike the giant "wine-users" or
"wine-devel" lists, you can narrow your search to specific subforums.
- Posts that aren't active get filtered down to the bottom. Browsing
the web interface to the mailing list just gives me a giant topic dump for the last month.
- Sticky posts can alert users to the presence of the FAQ and answers
to popular problems (like, click here for the WoW patch).
Fine points..
I wouldn't worry about communication between the lists and the forums at all.
I'm personally not convinced.
I don't like sending people to more different places than we already are for no apparent good reason...
Doing all the work to improve the mailing list web interface seems like a bad idea when you can just spare yourself all the work and use something like phpbb. Why reinvent the wheel?
phpBB is a wheel.. What I proposed is more of an anti-gravity device :-).
I agree that it might be overkill to make our own software if Google Groups can provide most of what people are looking for. (I'm not sure that it can, though.)