Hi Phil and All, Newsgroups are definitely dead (my ISP never properly supported it, so there is nothing to drop here ;).
For me there are a few big difference between mailing lists and forums: - First is that mailing lists *require* a much higher level of involvement than mailing list. What I mean, is that you *have to* subscribe first, from that point you will start getting *all* messages (which you have to manage, f.e. by opening a new mail account for it, setup a filter, store message, etc). User problems however aren't usually such permanent things in time, there appears something, than nothing for a while. Few users will accept the burden of being subscribed permanently just to ask an occasional question and receive an answer. Note that such higher level of involvement is a good thing and almost a requirement for *development*, that's why it works better for this purpose. Notice: To make a forum useful and attractive to users, *developers* are good to have occasional access to user space. But, since this has a high "cost" with mailing lists, few of them appeared there. I personally wouldn't want to manage a second flow of permanent requests in my mailbox. With forums this don't require a full time dedication, everyone can drop by if there is free time. [ well, mailing lists may be setup to allow posting by non-members, but that results in SPAM and you still have to keep tracking messages, plus there are gmane and similar trying to resolve some of these problems, but these are hacks and IMO all of them are alien for "normal" users. Forums are very well-known and accepted. ] This point is shortly: Forum makes it much "cheaper" and easier to get involved and participate. - Second: read-only access + searchability. I'm not saying forums are the easiest medium to find information in, but for sure it's much better structured information than a mailing list. Forums have "rooms" and topics, and you can usually tell what's popular by looking at number of answers and viewers, last activity. Plus you can use the built-in search. This point is shortly: Better UI, better organized / presented information. - Third: Noise. A certain level of noise can be found in both forums and mailing lists, here the only solution is moderation, if that starts to block usability. For that there are tools in the forums, there aren't in mailing list. [ We don't have this problem, and I'm not suggesting moderation. ] Of course there can be projects with other user patterns and mailing list may even be successful, but IMO this isn't the case for Harbour. We also have the "missing name" problem with our existing mailing list archive. It has been reported her a few times as a problem, but you didn't answer to these, maybe you missed it, or is this feature intentional? It makes very strange to look at messages where you have no clue who posted them. It's not even possible most of the time to tell who is asking and who is answering. Brgds, Viktor On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 8:25 AM, Phil Barnett<ph...@philb.us> wrote: >> Also, I'd like to strongly ask others about this, please give as >> much input as you can, even if this isn't a development question. >> There are probably ppl among us who are much better qualified >> to help making the best decision here. > > Sorry, I'm a few days behind on reading my mail. > > I think there's very little difference between a forum, a newsgroup, a > mailing list or any other form of interactive information exchange. > > If we want postings to the user forums, we need to advertise it. > > Like a big entry on the site that says Users, ask your questions on this > mailing list to get help fast! > > You would have to promote any forum, newsgroup or mailing list to make it > successful. > > It has been my experience that any of the three can be abused. Clearly, > newsgroups are abused and that is why many ISP's are dropping the entire > newsgroup structure. Recently, AT&T has told all of their users to find > another way to access newsgroups, they are dropping their newsgroup service > forever. Seems like the handwriting is on the wall for the death of > newsgroups in general. > > So, that leaves mailing lists and forums. I have no specific preference and > I've seen both be successful and I've seen both fail. I don't think the > method is as important as having inertia is. Let's try pumping up the user > mailing list, possibly consider renaming it to something the clearly conveys > support. > > Forums have really been problematic in being compromised and used for many > bad things, so I tend to stay towards mailing lists. > > I think newsgroups are futile. _______________________________________________ Harbour mailing list Harbour@harbour-project.org http://lists.harbour-project.org/mailman/listinfo/harbour
