On 25 Mar 2010 at 11:40, Eric Dannewitz wrote: > Again, most list things I have seen that have moved to a Blog or Forum > format have withered to a shadow of their former selves, or pretty > much died off. > > How is manually checking a website faster than email? Email is pretty > instant.
I agree with this. Indeed, the advantage of the blog is precisely that it's *not* instant -- it doesn't interrupt the flow by coming into your inbox frequently throughout the day. For someone who doesn't work at the computer all day, or how subscribes to the Finale list on their home email accounts, this is not a problem. But for the person like me who makes my living sitting at a computer, Finale messages coming in trigger my email notifier, and it's a potential interruption in my work flow. I can't turn off the notifier, as I need it for my work emails, but my email client doesn't allow me selective notification (I don't know if any email clients do so -- it would be a nice feature to be able to turn off notifications for certain FROM addresses). Now, there are workarounds, such as subscribing to the Finale list on an account that is not downloaded automatically, but I've chosen to not do that for simplicity's sake. A blog would never have that aspect of interruption, unless you're subscribed to the blog's newsfeed and display the newsfeed results in your email client. In that case, you're back where you started with the mailing list being a potential unwanted interruption, and are fully in control of whether or not you set it up that way. > I would agree that the archives perhaps could be better in > how you find stuff, but people rarely search the archives. The > generally ask the same question again, regardless of if there was a > post 2 years ago on how to do it. I know, I find this all the time on > my Wordpress sites....people don't use the search but will ask the > same question..... I would second this. I've participated in all sorts of forums for over 15 years and the one thing that is a given is that nobody reads the FAQs or searches the archives -- they just ask the question again. That does raise an issue, seems to me: Something that *would* be useful as an adjunct to (not a replacement for) the Finale mailing list would be a Finale Wiki that could serve as a FAQ. That could be collaboratively edited so that the topics could continually improve, and if you use something like WikiMedia (the platform used by Wikipedia), you can have discussions attached to each topic. This is something I'd gladly set up, though I'm not sure I can host it (it would likely generate additional traffic that could bump my hosting costs above what I'm already paying). > Wordpress does not really fit a good, vibrant discussion list. Nor > does forum software. I don't think blogging software works, but I don't see why forum software wouldn't. I'd certainly point out all the ways in which the existing web-based forum software is problematic and inferior to a mailing list, but that's not to say it's not a good fit. There are lots of vibrant communities out there that use forum software (I can name three technical forums that I participate in regularly, for instance). I agree that web-based forum software is not the best interface and is inferior to the simplicity and granularity of a mailing list. But it's not a fact that forum software can't host "good, vibrant" discussions. [] > So, in theory what you propose sounds interesting, but in reality, it > doesn't really offer anything better or easier. If you want to suggest > something, maybe suggest something about making the archives easier to > search since that is the real issue you are having. I think that's the key. Suggesting switching to blogging software is a proposed solution, but we originally didn't know for certain what the problem is that it's designed to solve. I've already addressed those issues today, and I don't think a blog would solve those problems at all, and even if they did, would do so at the sacrifice of a lot of useful functionality. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
