On Tue, 18 Sep 2007, William Yardley wrote: WY>Yes... I've definitely experienced that, and I definitely hope that WY>someone comes up with a GOOD bi-directional forum / email list type WY>thing. I think google groups has done a good job of doing this with WY>USENET and with their mailing list system... I don't think too many WY>other attempts have had as much success (that's perhaps because Google WY>Groups is more like a webmail client than like a web forum).
Yeah, and it doesn't seem to appeal to a lot of web forum users. It's a dilemma: do you emulate the brokenness of web forums, just so people who've gotten trained to that brokenness feel at home? I'm hoping to somewhat mitigate that by making the server side a REST API. If the default behavior isn't broken enough for you, you can write your own client to emulate whatever brokenness you prefer. (Well, presumably anybody who likes webforums as they are isn't programmatically inclined, but you get the idea.) WY>It seems to me that the gap here is cultural more than technical; the WY>conventions and norms (as well as posting format) are one thing on WY>mailing lists and newsgroups, and totally different on forums. And also WY>there's the push vs. pull thing. I would love to see some software that WY>does a good job of bridging the gap, though, because I have seen the WY>split in community you describe. Yeah, we've discussed the potential culture clash. And, because I'm dogfooding the web interface, I find myself doing things like not quoting as much (because the original is RIGHT THERE) and so forth. So far no one's complained, but I suppose if you're used to top-posting anyway it's not that big a leap. Of course, having a richer HTML version of the mailing list will help with this: you can always click on an included link if you don't have the full thread in your email client, things like that. And I can include avatars and such in the email, though I like to think the influence of the mailing-list side of the culture will town down the excess of included graphics and twinkly smiley crap that webforum culture sometimes runs to. (That may be a bit Pollyannaish of me, and probably depends on the nature of the forum's topic. In my case, chiefly play-by-message roleplaying.) WY>But that's a totally different matter from how I understood the original WY>topic (let's create a perl based MLM just because). Yes. And perhaps a bit off-topic for this list.
