Rob, to me your message really ends this discussion.
I've also noticed that I'm taking part in the discussions here using a
mobile mail client half the time, reading and writing many messages
offline. This wouldn't wo
>
> On 01/10/2014 09:02 AM, Johannes Lorenz wrote:
> > Pro (Forum):
> > * Subforums
> > * More functionality for searching
> > * More features: HTML, Images/Sounds, Thanks-Buttons etc.
> > * No spam anymore. I got 100 mails today, none of them interested me. In
> a forum, you can set notifications to threads you replied for.
> >
> > Pro (Mailing List):
> > * You are notified about new threads instantly. But I think phpBB allows
> it, too. Plus, It is easier for me to visit a forum once a day than
> deleting 100+ emails. So this is no pro argument.
> > * See [1], but nothing applies to LMMS imo.
>
> Additional points in favor of a mailing list:
>
> * Lists are archived in many places while a forum is a single point of
> failure.
>
> * List server software has been stable for decades, while forums' email
> notifications are usually afterthoughts and not reliable (example: I was
> very active on the "stella" mailing list for Atari 2600 homebrew
> programmers, but now that it lives on the atariage.com forums, I
> frequently
> hear of interesting threads years after they've already died down due to
> its flaky email notifications, and as a result I don't really consider
> myself part of that development community anymore. Additionally, when a
> thread is deleted because someone throws a hissy, it's gone forever, along
> with all its attachments, rather than being searchable in multiple archives
> or in my own inbox.)
>
> * Not only are you "notified about new threads instantly", but you can
> participate in that thread simply by replying, something that many have
> tried to implement in web discussion software (even Facebook) with
> problematic and inconsistent results. With forum notifications, you need to
> click a link, log in if you haven't been there in a while, and only then
> can you reply -- by typing into an HTML textarea rather than with your
> choice of editor or keybindings as you can with most mail clients.
>
> * Contrary to your point about search in forums, on a list every user can
> keep his own searchable archive (I currently keep 2 years, but have more in
> backups) most mail programs, even on the web, have far more capable search
> functions than the likes of phpbb. (For example, I can do a regex search in
> Thunderbird but not on any forum software I've ever seen, or specify which
> fields to search, while web forums generally give only the choice of
> whether to search the subject and body or not, and do only dumb case
> insensitive substring searches with a minimum string size, making it
> near-impossible to search for posts mentioning, say, USB or JACK, unless
> the operator has put some additional time and energy into making that
> possible.)
>
> * HTML and pictures are discouraged on mailing lists, making it both more
> accessible to those of us who want to read posts in a particular font at a
> particular size or use a screen reader, and also easier to focus on
> discussing code.
>
> * Forums almost universally have banner ads, some with animations, unless
> someone eats the bandwidth costs, while even free mailing list services
> have at most a plain-text signature ad.
>
> * Participating in a list requires the same email client you use to
> participate in all your other lists. Participating in a forum requires that
> you visit that forum regularly, which is the online version of making a
> special trip. If you're hugely invested in one particular project, this may
> not matter, but for those of us who follow dozens of projects,
> participating in their web forums is just not feasible.
>
> * Lists weed out most of the "me too"-level posts from non-technical users.
> (Yes, that's pragmatic and elitist. This is a discussion on lmms-devel, not
> lmms-users. If there needs to be a place for non-technical creative people
> such as graphic designers to participate, and they wouldn't be satisfied
> with the user list or forum, maybe there needs to be a third option between
> the two.)
>
> * Mail filtering in all but the most primitive mail clients allows you to
> not only put every mailing list in its own folder, but also mark everything
> read but emails containing keywords that interest you, while forum software
> user interfaces and notifications are usually an all-or-nothing proposition
> for each forum/subforum. (I'm talking about what you see when you enter,
> not what you're able to see when you choose to search.)
>
> * Lists can be mirrored by sites like Nabble that provide a web forum style
> interface for less technical participants. While this is not always a net
> gain for the list due to people who use the list without ever realizing
> they're posting to a mailing list, it's something that can't be done in the
> other direction with common forum packages.
>
> * Finally, LMMS already has a mailing list (actually, two) and a forum, and
> the mailing lists are active while the forum is dead.
>
> I do like forum software as a replacement for the BBSes I grew up with, for
> socializing and casual discussions, but their design goal (after years of
> refining feature sets to match what site owners want) is to attract users
> to a site and keep them there, not act as a truly open, shared and
> distributed development network. This is especially evident when you visit
> sites that don't allow unregistered users to see links or attachments,
> which I think must be the default behavior in the most common forum
> packages based on what I've seen around the web.
>
> Given that, I would propose a web forum to replace the user list, where
> community support for non-technical users could happen and real bugs could
> be escalated. But as someone who's never written code that applies to LMMS
> beyond a few perl scripts to massage my own XML project files to get around
> bugs in 2009-vintage LMMS, I'm probably not that much of a stakeholder.
>
> Rob
>
>
>
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