Hello all,
When I started TBUDL, I gave serious consideration to doing it in a
newsgroup. Four things affected my decision to with a discussion list
instead:
1. Lack of control concerning who and who could not post. i.e.
- Spammers
- People whose only intention is to bash TB (and there have been a
few even on TBUDL.)
2. The unbelievably great support I got from Max and Stefan when I
showed RITLabs that with a few enhancements, I could use TB to host
the discussion list. I had a brand-spanking new binary sitting in
my inbox the very next day with many of the proposed enhancements I
asked for to make TB a viable list server.
3. The list was about an e-mail program, and it made perfect sense to
me that since the people subscribed to TBUDL would be using TB to
get their mail anyway, why not keep two related things together.
(Yes, I know, there were a few people who were subscribed to the
lists but used other MUAs.)
4. I wasn't familiar with the process of setting up a newsgroup.
A number of TB related discussion lists have popped up since then
(mainly for other languages), and I say more power to people to do it.
The same goes for a NG and forum. If you want to start one, go for it.
If people use it, great! However, past experience has shown that they
won't.
For example, a TB forum was created by Erik Ommundsen at
<http://www.falkware.com/thebat/forum/> (Defunct now) in January of
2000. It was a relatively nice forum as forums go, but it didn't get
much use.
1. People wanted to be able to do off-line browsing of posts.
2. Forums are notoriously slow.
3. Depending on the type of forum, it can be hard to follow threads.
My personal opinion on a NG is that it would most certainly fare
better than the forum did, but now people are required to have a NG
reader, SPAM is ever present, multiple NGs on similar subjects often
get nasty cross-posting problems-- as opposed to the discussion lists
where the moderators have control over who can post and where.
I'm not saying it won't work, but me personally, I wouldn't use it. I
use the NGs for many different purposes, but for the task of
discussing TB, I am perfectly content and feel that the discussion
lists suit my needs exactly.
Cheers,
Leif Gregory
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TBUDL/TBBETA List Moderator
ICQ 216395 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Web Site <http://www.pcwize.com>
TBUDL FAQ <http://www.pcwize.com/thebat/faq.shtml>
Using The Bat! 1.46 Beta/3 under Windows 98 4.10 Build 2222 A
on a Pentium III 500 MHz notebook with 128MB.
Tagline of the day:
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and
he will sit in a boat drinking beer all day.
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