Jarrod, > I guess the crux of the argument is that there are many forms of > communication. We have the mailing lists that have been informative and > annoying. Informative from the viewpoint that folks can ask questions and > other folks try to answer them. Annoying from the point that we > get the odd > over-zealous person on here who deems it necessary to flame people or make > people feel bad or worse, stupid because of their questions. The poster in > question does not make it better for themselves by asking poor > questions to > begin with before doing some sort of web search or looking through docs. > I'm not sure that having a web based forum is really going to help with the "annoying" part of your argument. People will still ask poor/inapproriate questions, and rude people will still go off on a flame fest. Having a forum lets you assign moderators who can kill improper posts, but that requires that the moderator first find the post (and even before that, be there to do it - what about posts made in the middle of the night - they're still on the site for hours before anyone gets to killing them), and even then, as soon as they remove it, another thread starts up about what a bastard the moderator is for killing the previous post. :-) I used to spend a little time in Firestorm's bulletin boards (haven't for a while, but it was like this), and it just went back and forth that way.
If I were to get a vote (and I realize, not having put down my twenty bucks, my vote doesn't and shouldn't count for much ;-) ), I like the mailing list, probably for most or all the same reasons Aaron does. Ian
