On 7/06/2018 7:36 PM, Tom Marchant wrote:
On Thu, 7 Jun 2018 15:50:34 +0800, David Crayford wrote:
The good thing about Stack Exchange is that moderators can jump in an
close a thread when it starts to drift and delete answers/comments that
are inappropriate.
Censors. Terrific.
Doesn't IBM-MAIN have a moderator? On SE moderators are peers who have
gained enough reputation points to have privileges. In my experience it
works very well. SE has a very high signal to noise ratio.
I don't know Stack Exchange, but I have had experience with other forums
where someone had a brilliant idea to "improve" the forum by replacing it with
something else. In each case, a thriving forum was killed off and the
replacement failed to serve enough of its users that the entire discussion
essentially died off.
Nobody is suggesting replacing IBM-MAIN. But if some of the experts from
here would participate in different platforms it will help the mainframe
stay relevant. Using e-mail
for forums has had it's day IMO. The user experience with platforms such
as Stack Exchange is fantastic. You can use markdown, code with syntax
highlighting, create fancy graphs and votes. I feel the same
about using e-mail for any group collaboration when you have better
options with platforms like Slack.
I recently had a question about zlib which I was using to decompress
SMF logstream data compressed with zEDC. I posted a question on Stack
Overflow and it was answered by the author of zlib within a day.
I've seen other mainframe related discussion lists, most notably on LinkedIn.
I have not been favorably impressed by what I've seen. I'll stick with
IBM-MAIN, thank you.
Whatever flicks your switch! I've noticed that there are lots of IBMers
using Stack Overflow to answer questions regarding technologies like
Websphere Liberty Profile which relate to z/OS. Also, the
CICS guys from Hursley get involved. Younger people with gravitate
towards platforms like SO which they are used to and newsgroups like
IBM-MAIN will continue until they wither on the vine.
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