Am 26.07.2007 um 08:06 schrieb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
"
...
So when an official forum is blessed by someone, please make sure
it is
a forum that has a *bidirectional* email gateway. Anything else is
simply sub-standard for my usage patterns.
...
"
-- Rod Whitby
-- MokoMakefile author
Mail2Forum sounds like it could help:
http://mail2forum.com/forums/index.php
"Mail2Forum (or M2F) is an add-on software to the phpBB forum system.
M2F combines the functionality of a mailing list system and a phpBB
forum in order to add bi-directional 'email to forum' and 'forum to
email' communication."
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
