Imposit.com - Webmaster wrote:
Ahm every modern Forum can be set to send an email for every post to
all readers of the thread including the message
Hmm, well that's fine but I for one won't be reading the threads!
If someone posts something in dspam-dev I'll receive it, read it, decide
whether it's interesting and reply/follow the conversation/whatever.
If someone posts something in a forum I'll have no idea they posted it,
I'll not read it, I'll not respond.
If that only applies to me then it's no big loss, but as I said in my
experience that's how most devs work. I am on about 50 (maybe more)
mailing lists at any one time, some very low traffic, some much busier.
The likelihood of me instead visiting 50+ forums every day to see if
anything has happened is nil!
Forums may work well for busy projects where there is too much going on
to suit a mailing list, although even then I'd not visit very often.
What tends to happen is with (say) the Ubuntu forums I'll go there
because I have a question (usually drawn in by a Google search), and I
*may* then explore a few other interesting threads while I'm there. If I
have a lot of problems then I'll spend more time there or visit more
frequently. But with dspam-dev I strongly suspect that a forum would die
very quickly through lack of traffic.
On the other hand, forums are much easier to search for past
conversations than mailing lists are, and a forum linked to a mailing
list would gain the best of both worlds. Linking the Ubuntu forums to
mailing lists would probably be unworkable - too much traffic, too many
subscribers - but we're nowhere near that volume of traffic or that
number of subscribers.
Ill take a look which forums can link to a maillinglist but chances
are not that great.
phpBB can (see mail2forum.com) albeit limited to phpBB v2 at the moment,
although there is a v3-compatible alpha available at the moment. (I've
not used it, I just know its there.)
If someone spamms, the moderation can only prevent future spams, but
the old one are on way while in a forum you can mass delete with one
click, lock ips, .....
It's a shame we don't know of any software that might detect and remove
spam from email :-)
Seriously, though, is mailing list spam a problem? I don't get any.
Otherwise we would split existing users into 2 groups (and we have not
so many active users) so the danger is great that both can break the
community to death
This is why personally I would be +1 for mailing list linked to forum,
but -1 for setting up a forum otherwise.
On the other hand. Maillinglists are not suiteable for big traffic.
Not really true. Generally if there is that much genuine traffic on a
list then there's a good reason to split the list into smaller topics
(and in a very fusy forum it makes sense to have sub-forums). But in any
case it's not relevant, these lists are not busy. When they are, it will
be fine to have forum+list separated as each can live on its own.
Make also no sense transport the hole traffic to everyone so I think a
forum with email reminder would be better (guess why every other
project has mostly forums and if they have a maillinglist only as an
addition for a small user group)
The comparable projects I can think of have healthy mailing lists. Sure
end-user non-tech stuff tends to be in forums, but (a) all the LUGs I am
involved with have mailing lists, and very few have forums; (b) projects
like Asterisk, IPCop, MySQL, MythTV, Postfix (from a quick scan through
some of my subs) have healthy lists - maybe also forums, I have no
idea!, (c) dspam has mailing lists and you'd likely lose people by
moving to forums, and we've already agreed that splitting the traffic of
a low volume list into list and forum is a bad thing.
--
Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555
Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
!DSPAM:1011,490877bf150921911016403!
