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Gerald said: > Your comments are welcome.
Just some thoughts.
I think the more places there are to post messages the more difficult it becomes for users to determine the appropriate place to post and the harder it is to monitor. Many topics will fall into more than one category or be misinterpreted by the user and incorrectly posted. I’ve seen multi-list forums where the most popular message is to post your message somewhere else.
The reflector and the forum serve different purposes. I think one of the reasons why forum messages have fallen off is that people are not sure how many people actually monitor the forum on a regular basis now, and therefore post everything on the reflector. If there were a set of topics on the forum that supported what the forum is really good at like announcements, information and software releases etc rather than long conversational topics that might work. So if you have something with a long lifetime to say use the forum, if you want to start a conversation use the reflector. A message on the reflector to say there is something on the forum won’t hurt.
On the question of separating out the threads on the reflector and avoid ‘the wrong impresion’, it’s difficult. One possible way is to post on the forum the rules and the topic prefix to be used on messages like [BETA], [OPERATION], [LINUX SW], [WINDOWS SW], [OFF TOPIC] etc. It requires discipline on the part of users and a moderator to be quite tough if the rules are broken. It can then be made clear that people looking for certain types of information or qualification should look mainly at messages with certain topic prefixes. It’s just a variation on multiple lists but maybe a bit more flexible. Not my idea, other lists do this but usually not enforced so prefixes are assigned for special topics only and most messages don’t have them. You could even assign a prefix for a Beta release which only lives for that release etc etc.
Bob *** Confidentiality Notice ***
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