On Thursday 20 October 2005 06:59 am, Stephen Harris wrote: > On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 08:30:11AM +0200, Herbert Poetzl wrote: > > the main question is, do we need 'another forum'? > > Mailing lists are a lot better than web forums (IMHO). I've dropped > out of more than one community when they transferred to web forums > from mailing lists (although some people might not think that's a bad > thing ;-)) > > I don't answer many questions here (2 or 3 in the past few months only) > so my opinion isn't too important! >
I have found both to be very helpful. Mailing lists are excellent but for me I find it difficult to wait through a search of tens of thousands of msgs for some content I am looking for. There is an extreme convenience in mailing lists in that, one.. they come into your home therefore seem more personal... two you can maintain your own 'database' of sorts to search at your liesure however it does get to be difficult when manipulating,say, 25,000 msgs. :) The linux-vserver project has, I believe, one of the most responsive mailing lists I have seen, and the irc is excellent for solving problems in real-time. I use the gentoo forum as an example. It is large, very active, and I have yet to do a search that did not result in a fast return on my search criteria. New content not covered was responded to quickly by many, some quite helpful and others not so much... just have to use judgement. To me forums seem less 'personal' in that I have to 'go' somewhere to get my answers and for that effort it still is not in real time as irc would be. I think the primary beauty of forums is topic organization and speed and ease of searches. However, in this case, a forum is just one more place to pay attention to. I personally think the mailing list and irc are sufficient for any discussion. both have their strong and weak points... what would be nice instead of an interactive forum, but a bit difficult to implement, would be to create some kind of parsing program to parse the entire mailing list archives into a database, then present the database data in 'forum' form for easy searching and reading. I believe this would answer a need for a 'forum style' facility, and would make finding answers *considerably* easier for everyone. I don't know of a topic that has not been resolved somewhere in the mailing list archives. Resolutions done on irc, if not covered in the mailiing list could be submitted to the database for inclusion, and by running this update program a few times a day looking for new data, the 'forum' facility would be updated almost in real time. I also believe in people having the freedom to create a forum if they wish, but it would be a personal thing run as many personal gentoo forums are and not officially sanctioned.. I think the developers have enough to do keeping up with mailing list and irc and I would never expect them to add more to their list to watch... what we need to do as users is to assist them by developing this huge wealth of data already existing in the mailing list archives and in irc logs into some kind of organized, easy to use, one-stop information facility like this forum-database idea. > -- > > rgds > Stephen > _______________________________________________ > Vserver mailing list > Vserver@list.linux-vserver.org > http://list.linux-vserver.org/mailman/listinfo/vserver > -- Chuck "...and the hordes of M$*ft users descended upon me in their anger, and asked 'Why do you not get the viruses or the BlueScreensOfDeath or insecure system troubles and slowness or pay through the nose for an OS as *we* do?!!', and I answered...'I use Linux'. " The Book of John, chapter 1, page 1, and end of book _______________________________________________ Vserver mailing list Vserver@list.linux-vserver.org http://list.linux-vserver.org/mailman/listinfo/vserver
