I think a web-based system would be a disaster. It is far easier to take
a simple thing such as mail and layer over it more complicated things such
as newsgroup or web interfaces, while is it effectively impossible to do
the reverse. There are some extremely large projects which use mail as
their lingua franca, some involving hundreds of developers, including
Linux itself and the Debian Project. If discussions become so active that
they cannot be followed by mail, the only solution is a human editor along
the lines of what has happened with Linux Kernel Traffic or Debian Weekly
News. To see examples of how this is done, see:
http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/latest.html
The Debian Weekly News can be fairly eccentric at times; a recent issue
led with the Debian Bug Tracking System celebrating its 100,000th bug:
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/14/
The point is that mail has proven itself as the preferred way for many
developers and users to coordinate. I would support splitting a busy list
into smaller lists, but moving to some scheme such as web forums would be
a major aggravation for me. Using straightforward mail software (Pine and
Procmail), I can quickly blow through several dozen mailing lists, all
using the same interface from my perspective. With web forums, I have to
run around to each one individually and adapt to its particular interface,
which is comparatively slow and frustrating -- not least because I use the
Lynx browser; if a web page requires client-side Javascript, I'm done.
Also, I can read my mail off-line just by synchronizing the mail client on
my laptop via IMAP, while reading a web forum off-line is impossible.
Many people around the world are still paying for their connection time by
the minute, and forcing them to use a web forum is unfair.
-- Mike
On 2001-06-25 at 13:43 -0500, danch (Dan Christopherson) wrote:
> That's a very good idea. Note that this list will be moving over to a
> Jive based web forum thing 'soon'. Will that help? I think there could
> be a lot of advantages to also having a sight with concise summaries of
> conversations on the list/forum. Maybe something more along the lines of
> Linux Weekly News? Maybe with a bit more of a faq involved? Please,
> though, no FAQ-O-Matic - I've never seen one that answered the question
> I needed to ask.
>
> A site like this would need dedicated maintainers, wouldn't it? Or are
> you thinking of something different?
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