Quoting Steve Litt ([email protected]): > 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.
I may have to FAQ this on my Web site, because it keeps coming up. 1. There are far greater social and technical factors that motivate / create an incentive towards strong, centralised content control on Web forums, with the result that regimes of active moderation and retromoderation are much more common, hence the result tends to be more strongly stifled by the admins than on mailing lists. (I can picture my friend Steve Litt rising to complain about debian-user, and can only say 'Hold that thought, Steve.') 2. In particular, because on Web forums there is (typically) nothing anywhere near as effective as are killfiles (old school, e.g., mutt) or scorefiles (new school, e.g., emacs Gnus) available to participants to avoid seeing what/who annoys them, instead the forum admins are under greater social pressure to enforce social conformity against everyone, with stifling results. In case the contrast between the two models is not obvious, note this statement of policy at Silicon Valley Linux User Group for its mailing lists, which may be a more stark expression of attitude than most but I would maintain reflects an ethos common among mailing list admins: SVLUGs' listadmins normally intervene only to ensure lists' technical operation, to halt spam (incontrovertible spam, not postings someone merely dislikes), and to halt major eruptions of offtopic spew. Enforcement if any should always be minimal and public. (We don't do backroom politics, and our preferred means of social control is to help everyone apply his/her own well-tuned killfile.) http://www.svlug.org/policies/list-policy.php (Necessary disclaimer: I wrote that, codifying consensus among the active volunteers and SVLUG tradition.) 3. It is relatively difficult (or at least requires non-default anticipatory action) to independently preserve local copies of one's Web forum postings against the (strong) possibility of that Web forum folding up its tent in the night and disappearing. By contrast, I still have automatically made archival copies of my outgoing posts to mailing lists and newsgroups going all the way back to the 1980s, and have in some cases HTMLised those a decade or two later to create articles for my http://linuxmafia.com/kb/ knowledgebase. By contrast, the Web forum posts I've lavished time on since the mid-1990s have pretty nearly all vanished when those forums suddenly went away without advance notice. 4. Which reminds me: Web forums have over the decades since the 1990s tended, disproportionately to get clobbered (to suddenly die, to vanish off the Web, to go 'Poof!') without notice. Sometimes, this is caused by a corporation hiring some new Web weenie who decides to make a name for himself/herself by jettisoning everything the prior Web weenie did including choice of Web forum software -- and the new Web weenie feels not the slightest obligation to port over to the new implementation anything people posted to the existing forums. That's merely 'Web content', and, if the suckers who wrote that valued what they wrote, why did they post it onto a corporation's proprietary forum without charge? So, all existing content gets blown away without a second thought. Denizens of InfoWorld Electric went through this process twice before some of us learned the obvious lesson. The third iteration was a ghost-town. (I'm sure Web weenie #3 trotted out a fluent excuse for IDG/Infoworld management, explaining the sudden lack of participants + traffic.) In that regard, it's probably significant that it's pretty easy to carry forward archives and membership rosters from one host to its replacement or from (e.g.) majordomo to Sympa to Mailman, because the underlying data formats are stable and commoditised. Web forums, not. 5. Web forums have poor presence in Web search prominence and archives like Wayback Machine / Internet Archive. (In fairness and in contrast, crowdsourced knowledgebase sites like StackExchange are uncommonly good in those areas.) 6. In part because of the relative difficulty of preserving local copies of one's posts, in part because of the no-killfiles problem, and in part because of the webmasters-blowing-everything-away problem, and in part because of poor search presence, experienced computer users are more likely than not to prefer mailing lists / newsgroups over Web forums, which in turn impairs the latter's percentage of well-informed users _in general_ (with honourable exceptions such as, I assume, http://dev1galaxy.org/ ). Which in turn is a further disincentive for experienced users to participate. 7. Mailing lists and newsgroups benefit, substantially from an established user culture that pretty well supports substantive discussion. Web forums, not so well. All IMO and in my experience, of course. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
