Some of the posts on this topic seem to come from a world different from the one I'm living in.<g> I started participating in mailing lists, forums, and newsgroups in 1993. I gave up on newsgroups after a few years because of the very unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio. Way too many ads, spams, and off-topic or profane messages. Maybe things have improved.
I currently participate in several forums and they don't bear much resemblance to what people are complaining about here. Of course, they're not focused on celebrity gossip, shopping coupons, or the National (American) Football League, so that might have something to do with it. The best of all my forums is the VectorLinux user support forum, where people are friendly, helpful, and focused on the topics. No spam or advertising is permitted and since you have to sign up in order to post a message, any spam that does get through is promptly removed and the poster is kept out. Unlike the Ubuntu forums, we don't have so much activity that it overwhelms someone looking for a solution to a problem. The interface is easy to use. I've never experienced a forum that wasn't, though some are better than others. A con against a forum might be that it's harder to save messages than it is in an e-mail program, where you can just file them away to a mailbox. But a pro for a forum is that the messages remain there for a long time, maybe even "forever." With e-mail, they vanish unless you can locate the archives and go through a very painful search. When a forum's search engine leaves something to be desired, you should try Google instead. Limit the search to the forum's URL and you'll probably get much better results than you do with the forum's search engine. I don't understand someone's need to keep refreshing the forum. Most of the forums in which I've participated have a "show new messages" option. Just click on that and there they are. You can also click on "mark all messages as read" if you don't want to see the whole list every time. I never bother with those notification options, RSS feeds, and such. Someone couldn't remember to go back to the forum where he posted a message yet kept searching the Internet for answers. What's up with that???? We do have some responsibility to manage our own quest for knowledge. I also highly recommend looking through ALL the messages rather than focusing on yours and omitting anything else. If the topic is something of interest, be it Scribus or computer hardware, you can't tell what might be valuable to you, especially when you're a beginner. I learned how to build computers through reading all messages in CompuServe's PC Hardware Forum. I never asked "how do you build a computer," but through years of reading about motherboards, memory types, printers, monitors, video cards, and on and on I learned what the issues are and also where to go for practical, step-by-step instructions. I really don't like a hit and run approach to dealing with just *your* problem, but if you do want to hit and run, do what you want but it's your loss. Mail list or forum, it doesn't matter to me. As long as we can keep spammers and obnoxious posters out of a forum, that's fine. So is keeping the mailing list "as is." What I think would be a very bad idea would be having both. Then we'd have to check BOTH to make sure we didn't miss something. --Judy M. USA Registered Linux User #397786 Being productive with VectorLinux 6.0 SOHO
