On Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 06:43:46AM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Mar 2010, Pablo Sanchez wrote:
> > > we've decided to close the vbox-users mailing list as the traffic
> > > is very low and the VBox forums at http://forums.virtualbox.org/
> > > are a better place to ask related questions. Of course, before
> > > opening a new topic you should search the forum if your answer is
> > > already there.
> >
> > It's a shame to do so. I'll be bounded by the web interface for my
> > interfaction. So cumbersome. Not that it matters but I doubt I'll
> > transfer to the forums. I don't like klunky front-ends.
>
> +1. i *despise* web-based forums. why not just leave the mailing
> list as is, and those who want to stay here can stay, and others can
> move over to the forums. is there any harm in simply letting the
> mailing list carry on as is?
>
> rday
>
> p.s. my major complaint with all of the web-based forums that i've
> run across is that, when i have a question, a web-based forum
> typically does *not* supply a solution. rather, it supplies a
> historical dialogue from the perspective of numerous people who
> *think* they have the answer and argue endlessly while they eventually
> *converge* to a solution:
There's a number of reasons why mailing lists are better than web
forums ('fora' is probably not correct in this context):
- Mailing lists are comfortable: I can download archives and read them
in my MUA as if I'd received the e-mails all along, and then I can
search them using my MUA.
- Web forums are typically much harder to search profitably and don't
lend themselves to dialog quite as well as mailing lists. This is so
partly because one is at the mercy of someone else's search engine
(thrid party engines, e.g., Google, might work, but it depends on how
robots.txt is setup), and partly because the contents created in a
web forum is typically not as rich as on a mailing list (because one
is more constrained by the web forum's input boxes; compare to
e-mail).
Web forums _are_ useful to users who don't use e-mail for these sorts of
things. But what I'd prefer in that case is to have a web forum
gateway/interface to a mailing list.
To be fair, I think these issues can be overcome, but to me e-mail (and
IRC!) is the currency of open source projects (note: open source != free
support, but that's another story).
Also, if you keep the IRC channel then knowledgeable users will likely
tend to avoid the web forum for the IRC channel, which means that the
forum's contents will suffer as it will tend to deal mostly with newbie
questions.
Cheers,
Nico
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