> In the past, every single forum, shared photo solution, or other canned > packages have been compromised within a year of being installed. > > I'd prefer to stick to mailing lists.
General opinion here is greatly towards the forum, as far as I can tell, but I hope to see more opinions, even in favour of the mailing list. > Joining: > > Forum Need to join and confirm by email before you can post. > Mail Need to join and confirm by email before you can post Since with mail, I'll be getting *all* mails, I have to find a way and setup reader tools to make new flow of mails manageable. This may require new mail address, new mailbox, new filters and new local storage depending on your solution. Very important aspect is that your e-mail address can easily become a target for SPAM, whatever you do, thanks to gmane, mail-archive, nabble and other gateways which present e-mails to the anonymous web. This can be a tolerable amount of burden on a mailing list, but it's not tolerable when all you want to do is ask one (or few) question(s). > Speed: > > Forum As soon as you post, everyone can read it. > Mailing As soon as you post, it is sent to everyone. Forum is real-time here, while mailing list it's not always the case, due to battle with SPAM and other issues. One more point in favour of forums: You can *edit* messages. This makes it very easy to correct typos and have "pinned" messages with constantly updated information in them. With e-mail, once you pressed 'send' you can only resend or send a correction. I many times feel this is a limitation, and it's especially good to avoid to confuse users with typos and mistakes. Such feature can enhance the quality of information. > software > > Forum: Browser, everyone has one or more. > Mail: eMail. Everyone has one or more. Browser wins here. Unless you're lucky to have a web interface for your mail, especially if you want to actively participate. > Searching: > > Forum: Only as good as the package you are using allows it to be. > Mailing list: We can search our archives with Google. Latter is not very easy to use. I use gmail and offline mailer so this problem is solved though. Anyhow the information isn't presented in a structured way to the user. This can be a problem for those who don't know what to exactly search for. > Control > > Forum: Admins have control. The host always has advertising on the pages. > Mailing: Admins have control. Since mailing lists are hosted on my server, > there is no advertising. No adverts on sf.net or if we do our own phpBB setup on sf.net, or on your site. On mailing lists there are: I've seen automatically appended mail provider, web gateway and personal adverts here on this very mailing list (thanks to nabble, gmane and friends). Not a biggy, but such thing isn't present on a forum and with many non-regular users it works much better. [ forums can be bad here when they become avatar - signature showrooms, but that can be controlled from admin panel. ] > Spam > > Forum: people can join and spam > mail: people can join and spam. Yes. On Forums *any* user with enough rights can ban the user, all users can personally ban anyone, and any user can be promoted as moderator. With mailing list this is also partially possible, but usually more complicated to manage, since everyone has to use his own tools. > Overall, I just don't see much difference. People keep making this argument, > but there isn't much difference between a bbs forum and a mailing list. Have > we actually promoted our user support mailing list? Have we added a Google > search link? Is it obvious on our main page? If we haven't, it's failed > because nobody knows about it. We have it on our website since at least 1 year. The list is sadly looking anonymous, and very few developers are lurking there. I think it didn't work out :( Brgds, Viktor _______________________________________________ Harbour mailing list Harbour@harbour-project.org http://lists.harbour-project.org/mailman/listinfo/harbour
