An advantage of forums is that messages can be more easily organized by general topic.
eg. "building and configuration", "REST", "Spatial", "graph algorithms", "visualizations", etc... You could create a separate mailing list for each general topic, but the organization would not be as obvious nor as easy to navigate. As much as some folks are interested in every aspect of neo4j, some of us have strong interests in specific topics, and only a vague interest in the others. With a forum the more interesting topics could be more easily 'surfed first' when time crunched. -- A disadvantage of forums is that it is easier for my employer (via 'Websense') to block it. Thus far they don't filter email, but the certainly block more than half the web. They especially like to block any websites that support collaboration and interaction with people outside the company. -- WRT formatting text. I've been subscribed to mailing lists since the late '80's. Only in the past year have I relented and started using HTML email for many of my communications. Surprisingly, for technical email, it is really nice to be able to easily visually differentiate text and commentary and code and code-changes. -- FWIW, he nicest forum software I've seen is whatever it is the 'hangout' series of musical instrument forums uses (I think they wrote it themselves): http://www.banjohangout.org http://www.fiddlehangout.org etc... (there are a bunch of them now) -- I agree that putting all ones eggs in the Google basket makes me nervous for any emerging business or technology. They are, first and foremost, a very large, for profit, company. They can and should be expected to always operate in their own best interest which may not align with anyone else's. I wouldn't expect to see any sort of "Public Utility" style regulation any time in the forseeable future - at least in the current US political climate. -- Rick Otten rot...@windfish.net O=='=+ _______________________________________________ Neo4j mailing list User@lists.neo4j.org https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user
