On Wed, 7/10/13, Ron Bean <bucketwo...@rbean.users.panix.com> wrote: I'm kind of amazed that there's no such thing as a forum that's bidirectionally gatewayed to a mailing list. It's not as if it would be difficult. But the people who write such things don't seem to have thought of it. -----------
Oh there is, and it's absolutely horrid. Unless they've changed it (again) since the last time I went there, Baen Book's forum, the Baen Bar, uses such a system. Take the worst parts of an e-mail list, a web forum and a Usenet newsgroup and roll them together. Originally they had one or more e-mail lists and when they went to a forum they kept the e-mail lists and attempted to make it so one could reply to both the list and the forum by e-mail. One exceptionally useless feature was how notifications of replies were handled. If you posted on the forum to be notified of replies, you'd get an e-mail for every single reply instead of (like sanely programmed fora) just one note until you revisited the thread. But wait! It's even worse! Those reply notifications were 99.9% useless. They had a link to click but instead of going to the newest unread reply in a thread, or even to the start of the thread, all those links went to the same place - the root level of the forum. Didn't even go to the subforum the thread was in. So if you posted a lot on the forum and were fool enough to set it to automatically notify of replies, your inbox got blasted with a ton of e-mails more useless than SPAM. But it gets worse yet! The forum search was also mostly useless. It seemed to be able to only look in the last X number of posts. Since the Bar is a quite busy forum, once a couple of days went by you could forget finding your old posts with the search. I suggested to Baen (more than once) that they should dump the bugridden system (that they had paid actual money for) and replace it with any of the well proven open source free forums. Noooo. Couldn't do that! They just had to keep things with the e-mail for the members who wanted it that way instead of saying "The forum we're using is a big POS so we're moving to a forum only system that actually works. The e-mail lists will soon be discontinued." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
