There *are* IMHO some problems with IBMMAIN but it is not clear to me that they are significant enough to worry about nor that some new forum would necessarily be better overall.
- Searchability. The archives leave a lot to be desired in this regard IMHO. - Topic drift. There is something of tendency for many threads here to drift into hardware nostalgia, sometimes with the effect of obscuring the original question. There are often answers here from people who did not read the original question. A better "threaded" interface would help prevent this. - Lack of formatting. Yeah, I know a lot of old-timers love plain text (let the flames begin!) but most modern fora have the ability to set off code examples at the very least. I think that would be useful here. Phil is of course right: whether you are inventing a forum or a software product, it is good to start from a user problem and proceed from there to a solution. Solutions in search of a problem lead to the dread situation of "educating the market." Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Phil Smith III Sent: Friday, June 26, 2020 1:00 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: New Mainframe Community Henri Kuiper wrote: >Wow. What a lot of pushback. Well, nobody has offered any problem that this new forum is going to solve. Nor does that web page you cite: it says "I did this technically interesting thing", but that isn't solving a *problem*. That's my objection: we have a solution to the problem that works. If there's a better one, great; but there have, as has been noted, been several other fora created, and since none of them solved a problem that IBM-MAIN had, they're pretty well all dead. That's key both for products and open source offerings: there needs to be an actual problem that gets solved. Mattermost/MatterMost (it's unclear from that page which is the actual name) looks like yet another Teams/Lync/Fuze, and that's a real problem that companies have-but IBM-MAIN does not. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
