On 08/12/2012, lordkrandel <lordkran...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 08/12/2012 05:30, Kai Hendry wrote: >> Stick to a mailing list with Web archives. > > I've always thought that forums, bbs and mailing lists are > "plain old hierarchical filesystems" gone astray. These tools represent > bad implementations of written communication between users. > > Imagine threads as folders, mails as files, subthreads as subfolders. > Users should be able to create their topics and posts, but not to modify > or delete anything. The mantainer can compress the topics with gz when > it's time to make an archive. > > If you do not care about their user base, and also do not care about > integration with mail clients, just share a folder over 9p, FTP, HTTP or > whatever. > > SMTP and POP suck hard.
Well, web fora, yes, but a mailing list is actually a decent model of written communication between users. True about SMTP. I never use BBSs or POP so I can make no worthy comment. The forum could be a mere sticky directory, which would allow all normal forumnal activities. The difficulty is how to share it: the only user ID is the server's, so UID checks are in vain; even with 9p, which can authenticate a remote user, it must then set its UID, and I will not have such a server working as root! I could check UIDs in the server, but that means more code... A mailing list is easier to configure. In this case, I'm limited too by the host machine, which is not mine.
