[ic] Re: FORUM - instead of Mailing List

Steffen Dettmer interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Mon Dec 31 10:45:46 2001


* William Borrelli wrote on Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 14:44 -0500:
> I have to agree with the Forums. I have always found it much easier
> to plow my through forums (Vbulletin, UBB, PHPBB styles) than trying
> to serach through emails. 

Well, maybe you have not a nice mail archive?

> I am still having problems getting Interchange setup with MySQL, and
> could not find anything searching through the past emails.

oki, so you need a searchable mailinglist archive. Well, it's
available already.

> A forum topic specifically for Database setups would be real
> handy right about now.

Well, structuring information is usually a nice idea. But there
may be a thread about installation in an installation forum which
answers your database question, so you would need to search over
any forum. Well, and so you can search over emails :)

> > I think you are missing the point.  I WANT it as email, the forum
> > is not as organized as my email is, I can't filter the forum, and
> > I can't take the forum with me on my laptop.

Email can be sorted locally, for instance I may keep some
messages only, or I can mark them with some flag and I can add
comments. I really like email. I haven't seen that forum but I'm
afraid there are a lot of things that cannot be done there.

> >> lines of reasoning. Plus, the answers can be added to a
> >> knowledge base or FAQ really easily and searched very quickly.

I don't think that this is limited to a web based forum.

> > matter of seconds.  As I've said before, if your mail client
> > can't follow threads then you need a new mail client,

Yep, I saw some outlook users on this list and I think outlook is
not able to process mail threads. Happily there are other mail
user agents around :)

> > I did try it, for one thing postnuke generates some really
> > hideous non-compliant HTML that makes many of the threads
> > unreadable in Mozilla.

Hum, bad. Does it work in text mode? Many web sites _need_
graphics, but I don't see a reason for a graphical console to
read text... 

> > forum format.  Reading 60 messages in email generally takes me
> > less than 5 minutes, and when I respond I can use a decent editor
> > rather than an html textarea.

Exactly, and you can limit the view to interesting mails and much
more with email.

> >> Also, the fact that Anton and his folks are building a KB is
> >> super news.

Well, a KnowledgeBase is nice to have, but it takes time to
maintain it. But this is independed from mail or a forum, ain't?

And finally, it's more easy to work on email offline than with
web based anything. I can read mails on a PDA if desired and
anything. There are internet news, but mail is just more easy to
work with I think. 

Have a happy new year!

oki,

Steffen

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