On Tue, 31 Mar 2009, Andre Poenitz wrote:
With mailing lists, the client have all the power to filter, sort,
whatever. With forums, you are at the mercy of the forum admin. If he
deeems sorting unimportant, well, then you can't sort. Period.
Yup. Alping (formerly pine), mutt, and elm all do this.
In addition, it's not possible to mark ML-threads as SOLVED. The
latter is, in my humble opinion, a big drawback.
Again, a deficiency in the mail client you use. (Esc t D in mutt e.g.)
That's not a matter for the MUA, but for the message writer. It's a matter
of courtesy to append SOLVED, FIXED, or similar word to the end of the
subject line when appropriate. Heck, the MUA has no idea of the message's
content, but the writer does.
On the contrary. In a forum you are bound to use whatever the forum
provides, and you have to change habits if you go to another forum.
With mails, you can decide what client to use, and there are dozens if
not hundreds of them. And they will behave on every mailing list the
same.
More to the point, with a forum you have to go to it and pull then
information to your machine; with a mail list, the information is pushed to
your machine and all you need do is handle it as you wish.
We survived more than a decade without wiki and forum rather well.
(And lucky us got a wiki, not a forum later ;-})
Exceedingly well, in fact.
Rich
--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D. | Integrity Credibility
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. | Innovation
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863
