Federico Sevilla III: > Not being very "into" message boards I wonder: why a > message board versus a mailing list? Or is this solely to > alleviate the need for a mailbox with a large-enough quota > and some mail filtering tool?
I have always thought that message boards (more precisely, NNTP and its web incarnations) are a more natural fit than broadcast mail. One of the original motivations for the NNTP model for group communication was that it was more efficient than broadcast mail, in both space and time (CPU time as well as user-management time). I suppose broadcast mail still survives to this day as a way to do group communication because it is a least common denominator approach. But browsers are pretty much LCD today. Since wasting CPU time, bandwidth and storage seems no longer an issue today, probably it more a matter of preference. Whether you want everything pushed to you and in one linear, unstructured lump that you can view offline. Or whether you prefer to go to it only when you choose, and then to see and deal with it in all its structure. Enrique Rosel II: > if you're not into mailing lists you may just set your > subscription to "no mail" then just browse through the > archives at http://lists.q-linux.com/pipermail/plug/ and > only reply when a thread interests you. Unfortunately, this seems to be the only way right now. It is a suboptimal solution. The problem is that you cannot correctly parent your reply. There is no choice but for your reply to become a top-level post. This causes what should otherwise be a single discussion thread to become disintegrated into multiple threads. No great disaster, but suboptimal. There was an earlier discussion about why a no-mail person or a digest-only person cannot attach a reply to the appropriate parent: http://lists.q-linux.com/pipermail/plug-misc/2001-December/001216.html http://lists.q-linux.com/pipermail/ph-linux-newbie/2001-December/005384.html I understand that the bottom line is that neither the archive nor the digest gives you the MessageID of a message, which is needed in a reply's In-Reply-To for it to be correctly parented. > or if you're up to it, why not setup your own message board > and invite pluggers to use it? A more incremental solution that would avoid a split: It would be nice if the existing software (pipermail?) could be enhanced to allow correct parenting of mail messages from no-mail or digest-only posters. I think that is the only capability needed for the current mail-based system to become also effectively a message board. That, and a search capability. (I can overlook that fact that one posts by sending mail, although a browser form for posting could be more convenient for some.) I don't know how hard this enhancement would be to implement, since I am not familiar with the current software. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness http://health.yahoo.com _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
