Yeah, this is the pretty classic separation. It's basically the
conceptual difference between "managing by walking around" and
"management by exception".
On a forum, I only look at the stuff I'm interested in... if I even
bother to remember to go to the site. I'm not active enough with gradle
so I'd probably never visit unless I needed something.
For e-mail, I just next,next,next,next through the unread messages (I
understand some e-mail clients don't give you a nice key for this which
I find unfathomable ;)). It takes a few seconds and sometimes I see
something interesting that I otherwise wouldn't have drilled into.
If you are already viewing e-mail through a web page then I can see how
it makes no difference. In a real web client, I can skim through a
hundred messages in about 20 seconds.... it's a big deal. That same
thing would take up to an hour on a web site. No time for that.
Notifications from the forum are nice when they are working. Routinely
this sort of thing goes down unnoticed, messages are missed, etc... and
without being able to respond through e-mail that's sometimes the one
extra hurdle that prevents a response ("Gee, what login did I use
again... oh, never mind.") This is why a list->forum bridge is
appealing to some communities.
I follow exactly two forums right now. One I setup (and the e-mail
notifications are always dying) and the other that I'm just heavily
involved in (but would _love_ if the e-mail notifications actually
worked). In both of those cases, getting the forum users to switch to a
mailing list would actually be a problem because more than half are not
technically inclined... but I suffer daily just the same. ;)
-Paul
On 9/13/2011 8:15 AM, Andrew Thorburn wrote:
Mmmm... My own preference is generally for forums, as I don't tend to
be heavily involved with any given community so I vastly prefer it if
I can sign up for a forum and just get the email notifications for the
topics I am actively participating in. The fact that mailing lists
send me everything (with no way to cut out that which I'm not
participating in) doesn't result in me being overly fond of mailing
lists. It's not so bad for ones with fairly low traffic, but for
others it would be really unpleasant (e.g. the Linux Kernel). I'm sure
that I could, with some amount of effort, get Gmail to auto-mute
threads that I'm not actively participating in, but I'd prefer not to
have to go that effort for every mailing list I need to deal with,
especially if I'm just asking one question about something fairly
specific...
I can certainly understand why people would prefer mailing lists, and
this thread has brought up a few things I hadn't really thought of in
that regard, but it looks like there's an almost insurmountable gap
between what people who prefer mailing lists want, and what people who
prefer forums want out of the whole deal.
Just my thoughts on what I prefer.
- Andrew
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 10:24 PM, Paul Speed
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 9/13/2011 4:38 AM, Luke Daley wrote:
On 13/09/2011, at 9:14 AM, Jeppe Nejsum Madsen wrote:
Hans Dockter<[email protected]> writes:
[...]
So this forum is planned to be a primary entry point for all kind of
things.
We also want it to be deeply integrated with the other tools we are
using.
In that respect it is much better for the newbie. But the way we plan to
use
it will also make it very useful for the advanced users and hopefully
they
stay involved. We will definitely provide the input that makes it
interesting for them to stay.
For me this is an important piece in our effort to improve communication
with the community.
Let me just outline how I currently participate (here and elsewhere).
I follow the mailing lists and glance through the postings, reading a
few interesting posts, but can (I try to convince my self :-) follow
status, any major issues etc. I can do this for 30+ communities in
<30min using the same email program (if there are no large topics etc).
If the only interface is web based, I will not read it on a daily
basis, it's just too slow. I will only go there if I had a problem. This
in turns mean I will not answer any posts that I knew the answer to,
never figure out clever ways to do things etc. because I would never see
it unless I actively googled it.
Juts my 2c....
The new forum has the option of sending email notifications for all new
postings, or all new postings and all new replies.
Here's an example of the email notifications:
https://skitch.com/ldaley/f2t53/new-idea-proposal-dont-show-skipped-tasks-inbox
If you elect to only receive notifications of new topics, for any topic
that interests you you can click the “Notify me when people reply” to
subscribe to that thread.
There are people who like forums and there are people who like mailing
lists. Though, respectfully, telling e-mail preferrers that they can get
notifications is a little like telling forum preferrers that they already
have that since the mailing list has a web-based archive.
It's just too bad there wasn't a way to make both work. While it's a little
kludgy, I've seen it done in other communities with some kind of bridge.
You will definitely lose people when the mailing list dies. You will
probably gain some folks on the forum (though anyone who couldn't figure a
mailing list out is going to be totally lost in groovy+gradle, frankly... so
good luck with that in the case of "easier to use". ;))
I may try it... but I'm sort of leaning towards not bothering. Which I know
doesn't amount to much. But I have a feeling that's the way every e-mail
preferrer will feel... a little bit like they don't amount to much.
Grumble-grumble, wah, wah, etc. ;)
-Paul
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