Hi all, Thanks, for all the feedback!
First of all, let me say more clearly that it's not either the forum or the mailing list, but it's the mailing list and perhaps the forum as an extra. When the forum doesn't work, I'll remove it again, because I dislike dead fora as much as everyone else. I'll try to address all of your remarks, but it's not based on any knowledge of managing a forum myself yet... At 2005-07-26 12:14, Declan Moriarty wrote: >Recently, Somebody Somewhere wrote these words >> Hi friends, >> >> I have set up a forum at: >> >> http://www.chipdir.nl/phpBB2/ >> >> Personally I like mailing lists very much, but >> a lot of the new internetters don't seem to >> understand that concept and a forum also has >> other advantages and setting one up is very >> easy by now. >> >> I have had several requests to set up a forum, >> mainly for the Amazon scripts that I offer for >> free at: >> http://www.chipdir.nl/amazon/ >> >> Please have a look and let me (or us here >> on this mailing list) know what you think >> or add your comment in the forum. I'm new >> at this so I appreciate any feedback! >> >> This mailing list of course stays as it is, >> thanks to Bruce Bergman, who has been >> providing it for free for many years already! >> >It appears to be at the alpha stage. > >I posted a moan on it. The colours didn't show in the 'view'. If you >chose 2 font colours sucessively, both went into the post and remained >there. The colouring came in as script into the text window, and if >some twit accidentally deletes a bracket, your html processing will >probably crash. I'm using the standard phpBB2 that a lot of forums use and I haven't changed the default settings, so you'd better register your complaint at: http://www.phpbb.com/ (It's open source software, so feel free to correct the source code yourself... ;-) >The ideal way to do that would be to link the mailing list to the forum >so that either was input to the same general knowledge base. Forum posts >would appear on the list, and list responses would appear on the forum. I don't think both media are compatible or can easily be made compatible. I prefer to use the software as it is, so it's easy to upgrade to new versions. But feel free to study the documentation at: http://www.phpbb.com/ and let me know if there is a standard way to do this. Or you can register a request to add this feature. Another possibility is to move the mailing list to Yahoogroups that already has a combined mailing list and forum system. BTW. the mailing list is already archived there at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chipdir-l/ (Does anyone know who manages that group? I could restore the feed to it some years ago, but I have no idea who owns that group.) >The list traffic has died off completely, unless I am missing 90% of >messages, so people have obviously gone somewhere else. I'm trying to find out how many people the mailing list currently has, but listguru doesn't seem to respond, but the last few years it has always been just below 500. For less activity there can be many reasons: - people have fewer electronics problems - people repair and design less (as you mentioned on the forum ;-) - it's the summer vacation - new people don't understand mailing lists and don't subscribe and older people just hang on for sentimental reasons - people check the archive first and find the answer there (not very likely ;-) At 2005-07-26 13:04, Bob Paddock wrote: >> This mailing list of course stays as it is, > >Thank you, but from past experience with these switch overs the >forum is the death sentence for the list. The http://www.confluent.org/ is a >good example. It was a active list before the forum and now it is 100% dead. Nice statistic on: http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.confluence Well, I don't know the particulars of that situation, but I know of a lot of mailing lists that have dead over the years on their own accord or by bad management. >>The ideal way to do that would be to link the mailing list to the forum >>so that either was input to the same general knowledge base. Forum posts >>would appear on the list, and list responses would appear on the forum. > >As long as spam harvesting of email addresses can be prevented. Good point! Also consider that people writing to a mailing list don't automatically give permission to put the archive on line and make it search engine accessable. >>The list traffic has died off completely, unless I am missing 90% > >The list is that dead here as well. But the list is not substantially dead. We have good writers here and with some stimulation this mailing list would blossom up again. I see a lot of people who are on this list also write on the 6811/6812-lists for example. (And some of them were already on them before I started this list). When starting a new thread, people will probably think: What list shall I put it on? When it's an 6811 or 6812 question, the choice is obvious but Motorola doesn't have a list for general electronics questions (although the 6811 list and before that it's independent alternative) used to function like that. When I started the Chipdir I felt it was wrong to send people with general electronics questions to the 6811 list, so I started my own list. But it's not a goal in itself and it doesn't make me any money. I have no problem merging this medium with a similar medium when that makes more sense for the subscribers. >To:Subject: Worldwide Email Traffic Averaging 136 Billion Messages per >Day, Says Radicati Group >Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 09:22:00 PST > >A new study showing year-end market size, market share, and four-year >forecasts (2005 - 2009) for all core market segments tracked by the >Radicati Group, Inc. is now available. According to the study, there are >about 684 million email users worldwide, with nearly 1.2 billion active >email accounts. Worldwide email traffic per day totals about 136 billion >messages, of which 64 percent are spam. > >http://www.industryanalystreporter.com/T2/Analyst_Research/ResearchAnnouncementsDetails.asp?Newsid=5457 I'm not sure what you are trying to say, but the next paragraph is: >Over 61% of worldwide email mailboxes are delivered through a webmail service >provider or ISP. Mobile phone mailboxes currently account for only 3% of >worldwide active mailboxes, but this market segment is expected to grow >rapidly over the next four years. So 61% of the people use a webmail service, which means they read their mail using a browser on a www-site, which is a good argument for trying out a more modern approach to discussing electronics issues using a forum. At 2005-07-26 13:29, Jan Wuesten wrote: >Jaap, switch off the Forum please, the mailinglist is better, easier >to handle, comes directly on your desk (mailbox), interesting parts >can be archived easily and if somebody says he/she can not handle it, >tell him/her that he/she must have missed something important in >elementary school ( reading skill...;-) Nice arguments (that I agree with as someone who likes mailing lists too), but suppose you would want to find out what the best car is, would you only interview Peugeot owners, because I can predict what the outcome of that market test would be. You have to consider that we are all biased towards prefering the mailing list system. And it's not either-or: I think that I may be neglecting the needs of a lot of visitors of the Chipdir by not offering a forum. At 2005-07-26 13:44, Pieter Hoeben wrote: >Yes, but I will probably forget to check this forum >too (as I do many others). And if I check it, it will >only be once a week or so. So answer-reply will >be much slower. I prefer the email list. Yes, I understand. Some forums will send you an email when someone has written something in a categorie that interests you, or has responded to a message that you wrote. Please also consider that forums can be much bigger than mailing lists. When this mailing list would have say 200 mails a day, a lot of people would unsubscribe. >But aren't we all technicians here? Don't we all >know how a mailing lists works? The people that *are* here, seem to know how it works, but most people out there don't. BTW. Some of you may have experienced how this mailing list was run originally for about a month managed by a company that was called AMC (thanks to them for having the courage to engage in the experiment!) and how that went horribly wrong. Bruce, who manages this mailing list, uses a vast array of filtering techniques to make this mailing list seem to run so smoothly! Also consider that a mailing list is quite primitive: You can't press a button to unsubscribe. You can't look at statistics. The archive is organized differently for every mailing list. We have all learned to live with these shortcomings, but it's very hard to explain them to newcomers. >The advantage I see in a forum is that it >can be searched by search engines as google. >Or can't it access the content? I assume it can, but I'm not sure. My personal theory is that Google still uses 32-bits PC's and can't hold more than about 4 G of pages and therefore has to be very critical of what it archives. Of course it will replace all the PC's with AMD64 or their Intel clones over time, and then it can archive much more pages. I have no idea how far they are in that process by now. At 2005-07-26 17:14, Declan Moriarty wrote: >> But aren't we all technicians here? Don't we all >> know how a mailing lists works? The advantage I >> see in a forum is that it can be searched by >> search engines as google. Or can't it access >> the content? > >As they are used here by my windows-crashing geek minor, it's the >instant response and variety that's attractive. This relies on the forum >being watched by thousands of guys. The list is experts helping (mainly) >experts; the forum has a lower skill level. Good analysis. >For example, we hit a problem (Let's say a pc crashing on a windows >game), and he will run and post on forums. He will check a few hours >later, and perhaps find 4 junk answers (including an offer of a bigger >cpu heatsink) mebbe a link to an alternative driver and a dodge to >lessen crashing in the registry. The cpu heatsink will have have been >bought by someone whose pc was actually overheating. He will choose an >option and go for it, and send a thank you, and let the rest of them go >to hell. Indeed. When I have a problem (like with a game that doesn't do what I think it should do or with installing the latest Linux or PHP), I will search using Google until the problem is fixed and I won't post on a forum (let alone subscribe to a mailing list): both are too slow. Please consider that mailing lists are usually totally out of sight for search engines, unless they are archived in an accessible way on the WWW. >It's an appealing way of problem solving, because the results are >near instant, and exciting. Indeed. But that is the first sensible approach. When that doesn't solve the problem and you still want to solve the problem, you think of other strategies, like asking people here or asking personal friends or someone in a computer store, or posting a message on Usenet or on a forum. >A forum without technical support helping >it out will likely fizzle, because people will post and nothing will >happen. Yes, that might happen. BTW. The Chipdir once had an experimental chat function located in Spain (provided by a Chipdir fan in Spain called Pedro), but of course that didn't work, due to too few visitors per minute. There was also a kind of guestbook where people could ask questions and that didn't work, because there were a lot of questions (about one a day), but nobody answered them (and although I hesitate to admit it: my own knowledge is limited... ;-) At 2005-07-26 19:14, Matthias Weingart wrote: >I am also a fan of mailing lists. Is there a way to connect the list and the >forum? I don't know yet. >(yahoogroups is doing it) I'm big fan of Yahoogroups and Egroups as it was called before that and Listserv as it was originally called and I manage quite a lot of mailing lists there. >The biggest adv. of mailinglist is that you can easily >save complete threads (or the complete list) locally. Yes, I know, but it will often have missing messages and it will have headers added by your anti-spam software and how often do you use such an archive? Wouldn't it make much more sense when there would be a permanent central archive of mailinglists/forums? BTW. Personally I'd appreciate it when users could get a dump of (part of) the database at any moment or could have it send to them every x amount of time (week, month). But I think we should let go of the idea to want to archive everything ourselves locally and accept the idea that others will archive things and make them permanently accessable via the internet. BTW. This is a great way to prevent wars, because as soon as you start a war, the enemy will disconnect you from their archives and thus deprive you of essential information. I see a warless future for ever larger parts of the world thanks to interdependences that make war impossible. >Web forums are gone after some years. But my Chipdir still exists... ;-) A lot of sites are set up by young opportunists. From the start I have always tried to give my site an economically sound basis. At 2005-07-26 21:44, Uwe Zimmermann wrote: >I appear to have been the first to join the forum, but like all other >voices here, I certainly prefer the mailing list as it is. I simply >don't have the time to check all forums which I would possibly be >interested in - especially since most of them require ome kind of >login/logoff procedure, which at least is a nuisance. Allow cookies and you should be OK. >If the forum could send out a daily digest of new entries... I'm not a fan of digests... And by the way, I don't see the forum being filled with very insightful messages, compared to the level of expertise that we have here... >I check my mail several times per day, but I will most certainly not >check the forum that regularly. It's a shame for those "new >internetters" who cannot handle plain-text email.... I have learned to accept reality as it comes. Reality is reality. You can't go grandfathery about it and say everything was better in the old days, before the French revolution. ;-) BTW. I would never have compiled the Chipdir when I would have thought like the grumpy old men here: Who needs a WWW site with information about chips: Let them study databooks! Our grandparents didn't have the WWW, but used the one and only original databook: The Bible! So why do we need the internet?! At 2005-07-27 02:39, Bob Paddock wrote: >Can you add a RSS feed from the forum? >You can see an example at: > >http://www.confluent.org/ > >It comes down to Push vs Pull. > >Email and RSS feeds Push the email out to us where >we normally check it several times a day. > >Forms are Pull by nature. > >The RSS feed would give those of use that like email lists a chance >to participate in the forum if we thought that we could contribute, but >without having to take the time to log in and read everything just to >find out if we could contribute. If we see something of interest in the RSS >feed then we know to login to the forum. Very good suggestion! I don't know much about RSS and was very satisfied with myself being able to install and configure the forum software within about two hours. As I wrote above, the software is the latest version of phpBB, which is GPL open source software and seems to be the latest trend in forum-software so feel free to contact the developers with ideas not yet incorporated in the software. (Thanks again for all the feedback!) Greetings, Jaap -- Author: Jaap van Ganswijk INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Hosting, San Diego, California -- http://www.fatcity.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB CHIPDIR-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
