On Monday 24 April 2006 04:50 am, Tom Spear (Dustin Booker, Dustin Navea) wrote:
n0dalus wrote:
In a way this holds for mailing lists as well, but I think the difference is that forums usually have:
- Large sections containing non-technical discussion
- 'Post counts', often used as a measure of status
- Signup date, also used as status symbol
- A visible power structure, being able to see which posters
are moderators/admins. In a mailing list people tend to treat each other more as peers.
- Graphical avatars and signatures
- "See who else is online" features
Without those things, such as if you implemented a simple web interface on top of the mailing list, I don't think there would be as many cliques.
n0dalus.
Apparently I like the clique-ish-ness (try saying that 5 times fast ;-) because I like every last one of those features..
I think this is true for the folks who like forums. These things are, as far as I can tell, the only things people on mailing lists can't get or do (with the exception of creating large sections for non-technical or off-topic discussions). All the other "advantages" of forums discussed here are easily implemented by any mailing list subscriber who cares to implement them through their e-mail client, through webmail, and through using Google or Yahoo!'s specific-site search features.
The one exception I note -- the large sections of non-technical discussion -- on every mailing list I've subscribed to, when there was a lot of interest in "off topic" discussions, a new mailing list was created for just that purpose. So having non-technical discussions is no problem with mailing lists either.
deedee