This is just my opinion Wink
I know a lot of young people prefer forums. They also have little or no
expertise with newsgroups, *mailing* lists... They just didn't grow up
with them. Maybe the lack of a user friendly interface keeps them away
from the more technical way that *mailing* lists and newsgroups are set
up (I've seen people that don't know how to sign out of a *mailing* list
on several occasions). I've also seen people complain about the number
of mails you get from a *mailing* list, even though it's easy enough to
sign up for a digest instead (if you know what that is).
What I also know is that the more tech-savvy people tend to prefer
having things their way, the way they can organise it the way they want.
The people that seem to be advocating the forum on here seem to have one
thing in common (and no i don't mean you Aaron Wink ) and that is the
newbie thing in their name. The one thing the people begging to keep the
*mailing* list up seem to have in common is that they are experienced
programmers who don't like the way forums work, because you have to work
through categories, can't have access offline, can't keep an archive of
mails on your computer (i personally have the list all the way back to
october 2005 on my work pc, which coincides with when i started using
rb). I only come to the forums if I am completely stuck and hoping that
someone from REAL will try to help me find an answer to a problem
(usually me trying to do something that can't be done in an easy way,
for instance giving background colors to comboboxes on Win32). Most of
the time the *mailing* list is a much better place to ask the questions,
since the people reading this list are experienced programmers that are
very willing to help others.
I conclusion it feels to me like REAL is not fully understanding the
fact that their most experienced users are not located on the forums but
on the *mailing* lists, and that by shutting the lists down will lose
the valuable help these people are providing for free. And yes it is
possible to start up our own lists, but they won't be official RB lists,
so that will never be the same. I also don't believe that REAL will be
able to force those experienced users to switch to a format they hate
(and it think hate is the right word considering the storm that broke
out on the *mailing* list as a result of this decision), so the free
help that these valuable people provide will be lost for everyone but
the few that actively search the internet to see where they can find
help for RB from outside of REAL. That in my opinion is a big loss to
the RB community.
PS searching the forum for mailing list turns up 1435 hits out of which
1 is relevant, but searching my Realbasic folder in Thunderbird gives me
284 relevant mails
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