Maybe you're right, and the whole point is here: mailing lists are for
geeks and forums are for all other people. We should then have a web
based forum.
Are you sure ? I find personally a mailing is much easier. You get the
messages with your regular mail, you can sort them to a special inbox folder
to read them when you have time. Whereas a forum you need to start your web
browser, generally wade through some pages to get to the location you want,
log on, use some user interface that changes from forum to forum.
Searching a mailing list is also easy : google or some searchable mail
archive.
Adding another channel is counter productive. Focus all data in one location
and optimize that medium to the max.
W
I'd have to say that for the casual or occasional user, there are
significant advantages to a web forum. For me, monitoring an active
email list like openmoko in my email client is a fairly sizable
undertaking - there are many emails per day to look through. I take
time several times a day to look through these, or just mark the folder
'read'. If I were only want to look at the forum once every few weeks,
then subscribing to the list would be overkill. On the other hand, in
order to participate in the list you need to subscribe. So web-search
only users are in effect barred from posting.
Even if our casual users wanted 70-80 emails a day for something they
only use once in a while, its still a hassle to set up if you don't know
about email filtering and etc. Lots of people don't.
Compare this to the effort needed to visit slashdot. You register once,
and you never need to worry about it again. Visit every day or every 6
months, doesn't matter.
The other aspect is that you are putting your real email address out
there on the internet for lots of people to look at. This means its an
excellent place for spammers to harvest email accounts. With a forum
your personal data is more anonymous. Plus there is potential for other
social networking style things like user profiles - what users are
working on, etc.
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