On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 11:14:00AM -0500, Etienne Marcotte wrote: : Sorry but I've never seen a mailing list archive really working..
That's a fault of mailing list archive designers, not mailing list archives. : No good search feature, hard to follow a thread (next by thread, next by : date, etc) Searching is easy for an archive. Several archives already have this functionality (MARC, eGroups, etc.). As for 'hard to follow a thread', if the display is threaded, and you get an opportunity to click on a thread and read the whole thing, what more can you ask for? If anything, forums often oversimplify this feature or reduce the ease of use of threaded designs. : Plus to post you need to be member of the mailing list, therefore : receive 400 emails a day... There are already other list-joining methods, like digest, that prevent the 400-email-a-day problem. I'm sure another registration method could be setup for a mailing-list front-end, to not send e-mails to people but allow them to post (hell, there may already be one). : On a forum you register, you post only when you have question, you have : separate areas (installation, query problem, design problems, innoDB : problem, let's say) and you can do specific searches. You can also have : email notice when a reply is made to a thread you started asking a : question. On mailing lists, you register, and you typically only post when you have a question. If someone replies to your post, a mailing-list archive frontend can easily detect that that reply was to you, and send you a message (if the original replier didn't already do it from his e-mail program or from the same frontend). As for separate areas, a front-end could easily manage that through an X-Header for messages posted from it and some creative processing (keywords, etc.) to handle messages to the mailing list that didn't come through the front-end (of course, once a thread is started, it falls into it's original "area", so you'd only have to do this processing for the initial message in a thread). I mean, in essence, a forum is a prettified mailing list. The thing is, there's already a great mailing list that exists, and splitting off a forum means dividiing that knowledge so that people on the list don't know what's going on on the forum and vice versa (unless they follow both, which is even more time-consuming). Is that a *better* form of support? I would argue no, and since a solution is easily envisioned, why wouldn't one choose to go with it? * Philip Molter * Texas.net Internet * http://www.texas.net/ * [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
