From: "Karl Swedberg" <k...@englishrules.com>
On Jan 21, 2010, at 8:11 PM, brian wrote:
FWIW, I'm pretty sure the decision to drop Google Groups is due to
John Ressig's account being spoofed by spammers.
No, that's not it. Okay, maybe it was one of the last straws, but
we've been talking about moving to a forum for a couple years now. If
you want to know what factors were involved in the decision, please read
http://jquery14.com/day-07/new-jquery-forum/
I read that:
"Additionally, we wanted something that lowered the barrier to asking a
question - something that anyone would be able to use"
Well, for some categories of users, the movement to a forum has done exactly
the reverse, because a forum is much less accessible than a mailing list for
screen reader users for example, but for other categories of users also.
For example, if a user uses a good mail client, he or she could configure it
so all the messages from the list to go to a specific folder, the messages
that contain some words in the subjects or in the body to go to another
special folder as they arrive, the messages are automaticly grouped by
conversation, and they can easier be all saved locally or all deleted (or
individually).
The best solution from the perspective of the users would be to have a
mailing list system that can also offer and present the messages on the web,
but this would involve more work for JQuery developers, and it seems that
this idea is the best, but there is nobody willing to help doing and
administering it.
So the JQuery developers have chosen to use a forum which is administered by
somebody else. That's very OK, but I think at least the JQuery mailing lists
should not be disabled, while there still are users that prefer using them.
To be honest, I've never been a fan of forums, either. But after
spending some time in the jQuery forum, I'm starting to appreciate its
advantages over a plain mailing list.
Can you please tell us which are those advantages?
(in general, not only regarding JQuery forum.)
Thanks.
Octavian
