On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 11:37:47AM -0800, Seth Brundle wrote: > First people, please dont get all angry about my suggestion...please hear me > out... > > > I really hate on-line forums. They're difficult to track because I > > must remember visit them daily. > > OK this is the first issue - 95% of people who need MySQL info do not need > it daily. Mailing lists are a poor tool for them. > > > And I can't use them while disconnected. > > Hmmmm...seems like some Yahoo! employee has never used Yahoo! Groups ;)
Huh? I'm on about 24 Y! Groups. Your original post was to request "A web discussion board." I don't think of Y! Groups in that category at all. They're primarily e-mail based. And the web interface portion is pretty bad. There are much better web-base systems out there. Look at DSLReports, for example. That's an excellent web-based discussion system. Y! Groups could learn a lot from it, interface-wise. > There is plenty of web discussion software (like Yahoo! Groups, > although I'm not necessarily recommending that one) where you can > still have all of the features of a mailing list, yet also have all > the features of web discussion, so there really is no reason to have > a mailing list only, except to be old-school. Ahh, okay. That didn't come across at all [to me, at least] in your original post. > > > A web discussion board is a much more powerful and flexible tool for > > > this type of community. > > > > Hmm. E-mail has been around for a long, long time. I'm skeptical of > > this claim. > > Just because its been around longer means its better? Not at all. But it means I'm going to be skeptical of some new shiny thing just because it is new and shiny. > I'm just saying that usenet groups and discussion forums solved the > problem of belonging to too many mailing lists. Yes, but they're not the only solution, right? My mail software solves the problem for me. I've never really had trouble getting 500-3,000 messages per day. > If every package I used involved a mailing list for discussion, I > would need to track about 40 of them. Right now the only mailing > lists I really am stuck using is MySQL and ImageMagick. You make it sound as if there are no web-based discussion forums that welcome MySQL discussion. There are many. > > > Thread tracking, archiving, searching > > E-mail gives you all of those. > > Unless you have the entire history of the mailing list downloaded to > your mail spool and have a very powerful, feature-rich, and most > importatly very fast email search tool, you cant both search > archives and post messages with the same piece of software. Agreed. I've yet to see a good mail tool that does it all. But that doesn't mean mailing lists bad. > Email is ok for thread tracking if subject integrity is maintained, but most > email clients cant reliably collapse and expand threads. That goes back to my original response to you--it's a matter of using the right tools. > > > Also emails get mirrored on google groups for convenient spam > > > harvesting - its really a pain in the butt. > > > > How would using a web forum help that? > > Because most modern web forum software has an option to hide your email > address. That's a minor issue if you ask me. Anyone can published un-munged archives for this list. You're assuming that nobody else will. > Also a web forum has a lot of other advantages: > > -Easily break discussion into sub-categories (especially for MySQL, where > SQL questions are combined with everything else, would be nice to break that > out) What sort of categories would you envision? I had thought about floating a idea for batter categorizing posts here, but never got around to it. > -Better threading, allowing subject change and collapsing/expanding threads Better than what? > -Dont break long URLs. Who is breaking them now? > -Heavily quoted emails easier to read. > -Facilitate private messages without using email. Why is that good? Do we need yet another way to message that's like e-mail but different for the sake of being different? > Also, a lot of people are adverse to web collaboration because most free > discussion software is crap. It is either not very powerful, poorly > designed, or difficult to install and/or maintain. Or full of very annoying ads. Y! Groups, anyone? > FuseTalk seems like an excellent package. > FatWallet.com uses it. I'll have a look. I've only seen a very few on-line discussion systems that really impressed me. > SourceForge is a great idea, but a poorly designed system. > Obviously a package designed by an engineer, its a mess. Indeed. Jeremy -- Jeremy D. Zawodny | Perl, Web, MySQL, Linux Magazine, Yahoo! <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | http://jeremy.zawodny.com/ MySQL 4.0.8: up 56 days, processed 1,896,986,981 queries (388/sec. avg) -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
