On Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:34:23 +0200, Jimmy Cao <jcao...@gmail.com> wrote:
Everything is moving to the cloud and to the web. Many people, including
me, only use the web interface for webmail providers like Gmail now. To
me, Thunderbird and Outlook are less desirable now that there's a web
interface that you can access with all the computers that you use every
day. Now, your "all-in-one" browser can replace all those scattered
background processes.
Why are online bulletin boards/forums attractive?
- The entire interface is designed for message board communication.
You
can navigate easily as the interface organizes conversations into
pages.
For example, you can just click on a link and you will find all the
that
you yourself started.
- The interface allows you to permalink individual posts and share
them.
- The capability to edit posts. This is extremely useful and a major
advantage.
- Sticky posts - Posts that are very important and should be locked at
the top so that they are easily accessible.
- Profiles - you can visit a person's profile to learn more about him.
This person can set his own avatar, his contact details, and even his
website.
- Convenient and fully-featured searching - you can do a search even
if
you are a new member of the forum. A good web interface or search
engine
on a NG allows this, but not with the same capabilities.
- Post count (friendly competition and statistics)
- Better hierarchy of forums - you have forums and subforums.
- Private messaging. Sure, you can do this via email, but with a
forum,
you have your own private message inbox for better organization and
access.
- Easier moderation - I would imagine that admins can delete or move
posts much easier on a forum.
- Sometimes the interface will tell you if someone is online or not.
You can also see the amount of people who are viewing a subforum or a
thread.
- Extensive formatting options - colors, graphic smilies, quotes, code
highlighting with GeSHi, etc. By the way, a while back I submitted an
updated D syntax highlighting guide to GeSHi, so eventually Wikipedia
and
Wikibooks might highlight D2 fully, too.
Nobody is against web interface and we also have it (ugly and sometimes
useless but we still do),
what we are against is the replacement of newsgroups with something lesser
like forums.
Private messaging... quite the opposite i want contributors more open
about what they think and talk everything here.
