On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 23:34:48 +0200 Svante Signell <[email protected]> wrote:
> (personally I heavily dislike forums :( Why not use plain email and > publish stuff on web pages??) A mailing list is like vendors shipping to your house. Forums are like calling 15 stores to see whether they have any orders for you yet. When you sign up for a mailman type mailing list, you don't promise to do squat. When you sign up for a forum, you typically sign a 2000 word terms of service with an indemnification such that if a third party sues the forum vendor for something you allegedly did, your house is on the line. And of course every forum has its own unique terms of service,but they all have indemnifications, just different types. When someone responds to one of your old mailing list posts, the response comes to you, in context, ready to reply. When somebody responds to your old post on a forum, you get an email and have to remember your password to sign onto the forum. You have to find the old post and figure out its context. So far I've spoken of forums the way they existed in the 20th century. There's a special place in hell for those advocating a free software project go through a proprietary middleman like Google, Facebook, Meetup, LinkedIn or Yahoo for forum-like activities (groups). When they do that, I resign from the group and find a new one. There's always another group when one goes to the proprietary dark side. Invariably, when a mailinglist converts to a forum, especially one of the new breed of oh-so-hip proprietary middlemen, conversation drops off to a trickle, although Dev1 Galaxy seems to be doing better than a trickle. And then there's this: Forums are like those nice little loyal customer savings fobs that every retailer gives you to put on your keyring to get discounts. But that's just it. Every retailer. You end up with a keyring with 4 keys and 100 fobs, bulging out of your pants. Heck, at least the fobs don't require a password like forums do. I can't join a forum for every, or even 1/10, of the excellent mailing lists to which I belong. So whose forum should I choose, Devuan, Supervision, GoLUG, Trilug, Inkscape, Publishers-Forum, Vim, VimOutliner, DIYPython, Leo, or the 20 other excellent LUG lists to which I belong? Evvverybody thinks theirs is the best and worth extra effort, but really, they're all good and the ones demanding extra attention are more of a problem than a solution. There's a reason mailing lists and chat do well: All your passwords are handled by the client (or in the case of a mailing list, not at all). SteveT Steve Litt July 2017 featured book: Quit Joblessness: Start Your Own Business http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
