[OpenIndiana-discuss] forum creation

[David Brodbeck]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Nikola M <minikola at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I think it breaks down mostly between "people that know how to use mail
> client", valuing their privacy and people who just "click" on someone's
> proprietary services, depending on someone else for use of even basic
> services on internet.
>

Mail clients are always problematic, though, and I'm not surprised people
don't favor them anymore. Heck, I've used GMail for my mail for several
years, even though I know how to set up and use an IMAP client and I used
to run my own mail server.  The reason is I own four different computing
devices and it's not reasonable anymore to commit to using only one of them
to read email; having the mail stuck on one device's disk became a burden.
GMail offered the only reasonable cross-device solution for me at the time.

The privacy argument is interesting because it cuts both ways.  A mailing
list means no one can tell which messages you've read, but it also means
broadcasting your personal email address to the world.  A forum lets you
hide your address (and, if you use a proxy, even your IP) but not which
specific items you read.

I also do not feel any "push" when using Newsgroups or mailing lists.
> Messages are simply there in their folders, waiting for me to read them,
> when I like. With one on the plus side, that I can take them with me and
> not depend on some centralized web server to serve them to me, online.
>

I meant "push" in the technical sense; content that is sent from the server
to you without an explicit request, vs content that only arrives when you
ask for it. (Although technically IMAP is also pull; it's just these days
polling the server and pulling down messages is usually done without any
explicit action by the user.)


> Using Newsgroups needs just ordinary mail client with Newsgroup support
> and "subscribing" to groups.
>

I'm quite aware of how newsgroups work; I started out reading them in "tin"
in college.  You're forgetting that it also needs an ISP with a working
news server, which is increasingly rare.  I don't think my current ISP runs
one.  Last time I used a newsgroup was about ten years ago, and even then
it was a matter of sifting a relatively small number of legitimate messages
out of an ocean of spam and broken threads.  It's kind of sad how that
medium has declined.

My mailing list archives in my Mail client are most searchable of all ways
> of exchanging messages. (both when I am online and offline!)
>

Yes, but that only works if you were subscribed when the question was
asked...


> Besides, searching mailing list archives is very easy, just narrow web
> search engine to specific path where message archives are stored.
>

Assuming the archive hasn't blocked web spiders to try to prevent email
address harvesting (an increasingly common technique.)

I like it much better then needing to browse through some simulation of
> newsgroups and mailing lists on web sites, that forums are.
>

I think this is the nub of the problem.  Forums vary widely in quality and
some are quite usable, but if you come in expecting them to work exactly
like an NNTP client you'll always be disappointed.


-- 
D. Brodbeck
System Administrator, Linguistics
University of Washington
GPG key fingerprint: 0DB7 4B50 8910 DBC5 B510 79C4 3970 2BC3 2078 D875