Seth Woodworth <[email protected]> wrote: [...] > Ultimately what you're dealing with is a cultural shift if you make a > decision between forums and a mailing list. You have very different > interaction types and cultures surrounding each. As silly as it sounds, > email lists are a significant technical and social-capital barrier to a lot > of conversations, as well as being a far less efficient mechanism for > spreading the conclusions of conversation. On the other hand email lists > are much more flexible, extensible and integrate better into most > computer-user's routine.
I don't think any of the above holds if it's a well-run forum and/or people are using good email clients with good habits. Good short-form discussion culture is good short-form discussion culture, whether it's an email list, a web forum or a popular letters page. Where forum software usually wins is by letting administrators correct bad habits of users, such as posting a reply as a new topic, asking questions which are answered by the FAQ, using rubbish web browsers or failing to trim quotes. Users can't usually do any of those: they have to beg the administrator-priests to do it. Where email software usually wins is by letting users correct bad habits of administrators, such as having poor search systems or not writing a decent web page or FAQs. Users and administrators can also correct some bad habits of other users, such as them using rubbish mail clients or failing to trim quotes. By the way, it sounds like the OSUOSL Forum-Email gateways are not as good as the GroupServer or GMANE ones. Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ (Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
