I've been mostly silent in this discussion (partially because it's taken me two days to catch up on it), but I have some thoughts/questions.
The gist of the argument for email seems to be: 1. You can download all the messages and view them offline 2. Standalone email clients group messages by who they replied to instead of grouping by subject line and then by date 3. Forums suck (in your opinion) I understand that now, but I didn't before because: 1. I use gmail and am always online 2. I use gmail, which does not group messages based on replies 3. I check several forums daily and don't think they suck Forums work for me because: 1. I'm always online 2. Forums have categories. So, I never check the hardware category because I don't do low-level stuff. I watch some other category closely reading every message closely (and reply to some). I occasionally check out the other catagories as well, but only if I have free time. 3. If I post a question or response in a thread, I often have the forum notify me when there is a response. So, even if I don't have a lot of free time, I'll see an email come in saying someone has responded to something I'm directly involved in, so I will take a minute to see what the new message is. 4. In a forum, you can edit a post and easily format your message (I could use HTML in an email, but seems like a lot of people here view email in plaintext and my HTML would just annoy them). So, my questions: 1. Is there a way to get Gmail to thread the messages based on who it was in response to? 2. Is there a way to get a mailing list with categories? So that I can see that a particular category and not worry about the other stuff? I thought that was the point of separate mailing lists, but I get messages ranging from questions on ordering and shipping the phone to problems setting up a build environment to marketing ideas to feature suggests etc. The traffic is getting unmanageably large. (perhaps you manage better than me. but I don't have time to sift through 20 threads with 5-50 responses every day). The result is that I delete entire threads based on the subject. I will probably miss valuable information that might have even been relevant to me because of this. Any ideas on how to reduce the traffic or make it more relevant? -Steven On 7/24/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 10:45:32AM -0700, Daniel Robinson wrote: > The fact that you are subscribed to 20 different mailing lists and you would > find it difficult to read all of that information on 20 different forum's > is your issue, and it is not the responsibility of this community to > address. Probably it is. There are many people *in this community* in the same boat, and in general, those people will be the most knowledgeable and the most valuable sources of information, since they will tend to be more technically oriented, and be the most experienced internet users, and will be plugged in to more numerous sources of information (since email is indeed more efficient for being connected to many different information sources). > To state, axiomatically, that mailing lists are more efficient is to > attempt proof by assertion. Not trying to "prove" something -- trying to give benefit of long experience in similar situations. Email is substantially more efficient, because it is intrinsically more powerful. For example: 1) Essentially any functionality a forum can support can be supported by good email clients -- threading, sorting (or categorization), searching, restricted visibility. Converse isn't true (see below). 2) Forums cannot be viewed when you are offline, but email is a store and forward protocol, and works perfectly with only occasional connections to the internet -- you can read your email on a plane; you can't read a forum. 3) A forum, and indeed any web-based application by definition, is fundamentally restricted to the functions that can be provided by a browser. Web-based email suffers the same restrictions, but email clients can make full use of the OS interface. And contrariwise, email also supports pure text-based clients -- try using a text-based browser on typical forum applications for an exercise in frustration. 4) With email, you get to pick what you want to keep and don't want to keep. With a forum you have no control -- garbage stays there unless removed by an admin. 5) Email is accessible to a far larger population. Email supports both web-based and client based interaction. It supports text and graphical UIs. It gives a decent user experience over less bandwidth. It works better with mobile devices (eg blackberry). 6) Email has far better support for exchanging documents, media, and other kinds of information. (Web interfaces have good support for *display*, but lousy support for *sending*.) 7) When you get really good at using a particular email client, that real "down to the fingers" expertise generalizes to every email list. Forums use different interfaces. Well, then, why not have forums for people who want them, and leave email for people who don't want them? The thing is, it doesn't work very well in practice. If experience is any guide, then the technically knowledgable people will use email, and won't waste much time on the forums. But a project at the current stage of the openmoko project will require lots of *technical* help for everyone, so what will happen is that you will have to follow the email lists anyway... I mean -- I could be wrong, but that's the way things seem to go with this kind of project. Kent -- Kent Crispin Technical Systems Manager ICANN _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
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