Re: [LST] Mail list vs. Forums Re: Anyone out there??? Is this puppy up? Call me bad...

P. wrote:

>Well, let me be the voice of dissent and explain that I like forums
better
>than mailing lists.
>
>There's nothing wrong with the mailing list, mind you, and I will
hardly
>abandon them if/when the forum takes off. But the thing is, I get maybe
a
>hundred personal e-mails a day, and a raft-load of work e-mails a
>day. Picking through those to read the GZG ones ends up beign a
seperate
>chore, and if it's a busy day they get shuttled to the side as I catch
up
>on other things, and clog up the mailbox until I find the time. The
digest
>format helps, but then I'm always slightly behind the curve.

I also get over a hundred emails per day. Downloading them to my hard
drive 
takes a few minutes per day, after which I can read them at my leisure. 
Better still, I can download the emails to a laptop and read them on my
way 
to or from work.

With a web forum, I pretty much have to be on-line to read anything.
Sure, 
I can open each forum post and copy'n'paste it into a text file, but
that's 
far more work than simply downloading the emails :-(

>Whereas with my gaming forums, when I have a few spare minutes during
the
>work day, I can just hop over there, catch up, make vaguely comedic
>replies, and head back to reread when I get around to it. It's more
>compartmentalized.

You're lucky to have an employer who allows surfing non-work-related 
forums, then <shrug>

***
Jaime Tiempo wrote:

>Yearts ago I was quite the active member on this list, and at one point
I
>was on SOOO many lists (almost 3 dozen) (by product of a volunteer
>position I took on) that I had to stop receiving this one just to cut
down
>the traffic. Now it was a big loos since I couldn't keep up with the
>community.
>
>What would have saved me was having all the major discussion lists I
was
>on as forums. Being someone who is considered an "old timer" when it
comes
>to the Internet I still prefer forums for things like this list. It's
far
>more concise, easy to use, organised, searchable, and moderatable. It's
>more accessable for the new person to join and browse what has been
>discussed.

Most of the web forums I visit reasonably regularly are pruned every
12-18 
months (ie., any thread that hasn't had any new posts within the past
12-18 
months is deleted). The archives of this mailing list stretch back at
least 
7-8 years, and is at least as searchable as those web forums are...

Regards,

Oerjan
oerjan.ariander@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry