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Hans L wrote: > I'm guessing that's not what you really meant, but I'm still not sure > your point is. Are you saying that if you don't want your email > address harvested by spammers, then you should not participate in > discussions about openmoko at all? Keeping your email address private > IS a valid reason for the use of forums. Then use something like spamgourmet.org, setup your spam filter, etc. > >> As for forums, they are very nice for casual use. They are terrible >> for staying in touch, unless you visit them obsessively. The nice >> thing about a mailing list is that the mail keeps arriving in your >> inbox, you see it go by, and you can pay attention or not as you choose. >> And if you miss something, it's easy to go back and find it. > > There are plenty of ways of "staying in touch" when using a web forum. > Almost every forum I have used has some way to "subscribe" or "watch" > particular threads. When you visit the site, you can view a list of > all your subscribed threads that have been updated since your last That's exactly my point => "almost every" has "some" way to implement standard functionality. That's really not very efficient, isn't it? > visit. You also have the option to get email notifications each Well, why would I want to have email notification if I cannot reply in my mail client? > time(or as daily/weekly digests) those threads are updated. In my > opinion the best thing about forums as compared to mailing > lists(although I'm not advocating *replacing* mailing lists in any > way) is it dramatically increases the *Signal To Noise Ratio*. Some > people just don't want to read every damn conversation remotely > related to openmoko. They want to ask their specific question, and be That's why they can pick and look at the threads they are interested with their MUA, or did I get something wrong. Btw, I can look at the mails with my laptop, and I can easily look at them with my mobile, as both share an IMAP folder. I can access it with a webbrowser by using the webmail interface. And all use the same data, via IMAP. All the superfluous interaction needed to work with a webbased forum make it not really feasible to use my mobile to catch up on the community while sitting in a train. (And my E61 has one of the best mobile browsers currently available, but it still is a pain to scroll around). > notified when they get a reply. Or they can search for their > particular issue, find some existing thread, and subscribe to that > one. This is what makes forums great. Well, my mail client on the E61 and my thunderbird on the laptop have really nice search boxes. And even funnier, they work the same way on the openmoko mailing lists and on the Python tutor mailing list. Now the 55 points question: Can you tell me if the search functionality for the Django mailing list works the same as the one for the Python mailing list? Other fine things about mail: Identity management (although my E61 does not support gpg :(, so it's not perfect; Hint: How do you know that MrX at Forum X is the same person that [EMAIL PROTECTED] is? You don't.). Client better suited to text communication (e.g. spell checking, etc.), while many forums have to live with a <textarea> tag. And all have to live with that when Javascript is turned off, which is currently the recommendation for any site that displays user contributed text. (you never can be sure that the site implements the HTML filtering correctly, can you?) Andreas -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGpkJBHJdudm4KnO0RAsVEAJ0a+bXk6omIPe39BML6TjxPnOB2hQCfTHiK zLX8nk7X6Yrlh6bejLYk+9Q= =9yUI -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
