In my experience, *very* few forums do a good job of gatewaying email to a forum, on the forum side nobody quotes properly (and definitely never trims), threading rarely works even for reading, and it eventually becomes unpleasant to even attempt to help users. From fields are almost universally lost, you usually just get a dream of "Fancypants forum message!" from fields.
(Who cares about a From field? If I see another experienced helper assisting, I won't bother to see if an issue was resolved unless the topic interests me. If I only see "Me too!" posts, it's a topic that needs attention.) More importantly, nearly every case I've seen where an active community of technically inclined helpers assist novice users moves from a mailing list to a forum, many/most of the helpers don't go with it, leaving the forums a barren wasteland of users begging for help and receiving nothing, while the technical users often follow dozens of lists and can't be bothered with terrible, slow and different forum interfaces. For those who don't understand the difference in interface, and the importance of consistency, sit down with a maillist power user, you'll find a lot of us can flip through dozens of messages at nearly the speed we read, moving to the next message or skipping to another thread with a literal touch of a button. Forums? You scroll, wait for your focus to find the top of the next message (no, it's not going to be at the top of your screen in a forum, yes it is in my own client of choice). Moving between messages sometimes requires clicks (which requires reaching a mouse, targeting a button, clicking, waiting, waiting, waiting), moving between threads always does. All minor things, but they add up to a cognitive load and time-suck, neither of which are pluses. Or maybe that's just me. At my peak I was actively reading over 200 mailing lists and newsgroups, actively participating in and contributing to at least 100 on a weekly basis and virtually all on a semi-regular (monthly) basis. Some I just read for information. Sometimes I'd follow the -dev list so that I could be up to date and help users on the -support list. Although I've actively curtailed my mailing list habits due to other time commitments, I still try to help users when my skills would be useful. I follow exactly two forums, and contribute less than monthly because the time and pain factor just isn't worth it. Users might prefer forums, but the folks who volunteer their time to help, especially on lower profile open-source products, seem to prefer the efficiency of controlling their own interfaces and email (and newsgroups) are beautiful for that. Personally, I'd rather focus on ease of use and efficiency for those answering questions rather than those asking as there are nearly always more users asking than answering, and if those answering go away, so ends it all. </soapbox> _______________________________________________ Support@pidgin.im mailing list Want to unsubscribe? Use this link: https://pidgin.im/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/support
