This is hardly terribly complicated: Just have an email address per forum. You can subscribe to a list for each (sub)forum, and to post you just email the appropriate address.
-Nick Johnson On 7/26/07, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I can hardly imagine how this really works? Firstly, please take a look at http://www.oesf.org/forums/ and count the subforums there. In a forum system you have main forums and subforums, i.e. tons of different boards where each one runs one or more threads (topics). Ususally you can subscribe to e-mail notifications for each subforum. This is the main benefit of a forum over a single e-mail list where everything is thrown in (compare between a large hall where everybody cries what he wants to say vs. a set of small rooms with special topics discussions). Now, should all new messages of all subfora be mapped to a single e- mail transmission? Or should each subforum have its own mailing list? For an unidrectional mode (forum -> list) this could work (even if new subfora are created). But how to respond? How do you want to specify to respond to e.g. "Developer", "Hardware", "Smalltalk", "First Aid", "Sell&Buy" etc. through E-Mail? Or even worse: how to create a new thread which should just go to a specific subforum. On the single mailing list you would simply drop it in between completely unrelated messages. My conclusions is that by this requirement "Anything else is simply sub-standard for my usage patterns. " some of the special usage patterns of a forum system have to be given up (i.e. the hierarchical grouping of different topics/rooms/subfora or however you will call it). For me, a single mailing list carrying all topics of everybody is "substandard"... And, another issue is IMHO substandard with mailing lists: it is the citation style - everybody has a different way of citing previous e- mails. This is a lot of waste of eye-movements to find the relevant references. A forum system forces to use a single citation style. _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
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