Quoting Lior W. (opensource.*.n...@neverbox.com): > Please don't take it the wrong way, but this seems like an opportunity to > ask to move this mailing list to a forum.
Web forums suffer several characteristic technical disadvantages compared to mailing lists: 1. Really terrible threading. 2. In general, no user-specific killfile or scoring function. (Where one exists, it is usually primitive. In any event, if it exists, it is one-size-fits-all.) 3. Relatively speaking, its technology makes the user's task of independently archiving his/her own contributions or those of other interesting participants non-trivial enough that most users very seldom do it, even for postings they'll later really miss when they vanish in the next Web board makeover. 4. Statistically speaking, their contents are not preserved for very long, being (far more) prone to getting discarded in Web site redesigns, cutovers from one flavour of Web board to another, hosting hardware failures, etc. To expand on the latter two points: Admittedly, most of us are kidding ourselves if we think we're creating written works for the ages rather than ephemera, but we like to imagine that our best postings, the ones we sweat over to cover a topic exhaustively or with particular insight, will persist, reach people, and maybe even become touchstones on the topic. This is just orders of magnitude more likely with typical mailing lists than typical Web forums. Therefore, in that sense, they return a much greater reward for the effert. And the quality of postings in general reflects that: If I go looking for in-depth and useful information, it's just far more likely to turn up in a mailing list archive. Search results in Web boards tends to be lightweight, relatively useless, and frequently just plain wrong -- as if more-worthwhile contributors are largely elsewhere, such as on mailing lists. Almost none of the worthwhile postings I've made to Web forums still exist. In some cases, such as the InfoWorld Electric forums, the forums' contents were mass-discarded without prior warning six or seven times in a row and then then forum vanished completely. Meanwhile, what I flatter myself to imagine having been interesting comments I made on mailing lists of what we now call the open source community back in 1997 are still there. E.g.: http://lists.svlug.org/archives/svlug/ Even where a mailing list or private newsgroup vanishes suddenly one day, I have the means to easily archive my better contributions by grabbing them from my sent copies, to prevent them vanishing into the aether. Example: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info2/astcomm.html http://buug.org/pipermail/buug/2010-August/003635.html On the other hand, with Web broads, you _do_ get some snazzy animated GIFs of contributors avatars and pictures of their cats, so that's partial compensation. ;-> This concern does not apply with OSI-run discussion media, but I'll mention it for the general case: 5. Web forums' central control give participants no easy and built-in means of working around the problem of unreasonable forum management. Whereas on a mailing list you have easy access to the real Internet e-mail addresses of all posters, and frequently also to the roster, and thus can readily discuss matters out-of-band, in general Web board postings do not provide independent contact information. Thus, in the general case, you do not have an out-of-band channel. In fact, the prevailing culture of Web forums doesn't even generally include use of real names, let alone real out-of-band contact details such as e-mail addresses. Not all Web forums are playgrounds of kiddies hiding behind 'handles', but many are. -- Cheers, Nothing's hotter than having a copyeditor correct your sex scenes. Rick Moen -- Max Barry r...@linuxmafia.com McQ! (4x80) _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss