RE: Over-The-Rhine Digest V5 #431

[Troy Miller <yort5thor@yahoo.com>]

Oh, what the heck... I haven't posted in a long while (qualifying me for
semi-lurker status), my wife's gone at grad school class, and I don't
have anything really pressing to do...

On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 17:15, Dave Jones wrote:

> There is a vocal minority who has spoken out against the use of a forum 

Bzzzt! Value judgment. You have no empirical evidence that people on
either side of the fence are a minority (or a majority). Not without a
comprehensive survey of everyone on the list.

> (a
> few people), but a lot of lurkers on the list who haven't spoken at

How do you know there aren't a lot of lurkers who are *for* the list?

> remember.  A lot of people, including myself, would love to see a forum take
> the place of this list.  And yes, I've been receiving the list for..wow...I

Why does it have to replace the list? We've already got Drew's forums.
Lot of people hang out there. We've got the list, too. Lot of people
hang out there. Some people hang out in the forum and not the list.
Others, like myself, do the opposite. No harm, no foul.

And really, if the "official" list goes away, then the people who really
want a list will more than likely make a new one.

> Bottom line, the forum would probably be a lot more useful to a greater
> number of people that this list is.  And this is coming from someone who has
> used the list longer than all but a few people here (you know who you are).

I appreciate your longevity, but that really doesn't offer any
correlation to whether or not the greater number of people prefer the
list or the forum.

> From: Keith B <keith@rcltd.org>
> You can set up non-OtR topics to your heart's content and everyone knows
> before they look (or don't) at the content what the posts will be about,
> more or less.  Much more effective than a subject line.  Among other

Why is that? It's just a different education. Anybody can quite easily
set up a filter to remove any email with a subject starting with "[OT]".
Not technically any harder or easier, just a different learning curve
(and therefore, one way will be easier/more natural for some, while for
others the other way might float their boat).

> Threads provide much better continuity for longer discussions.

Not for me. I absolutely *hate* having to click through every message,
and the forum setup encourages people to not quote the person before
them (since they assume the reader can just "go back up the tree.").
Done correctly, a list style conversation works *much* better for me.

>   You can just
> scroll through an entire topic instead of opening related emails in
> isolation sequentially and patching them together in your head.

Or you can have the whole conversation interwoven, just like a real
conversation, without having to scroll up and down to remember what the
heck we're talking about.

> It's much easier to find and resurrect a past topic when inspiration or
> edification strikes than trolling the email archives.

That's only really a limitation of the archives. If so desired, they
could be archived in a format very similar to a forum.

> Bold and italic fonts, color, emoticons, images.

Ahhhh!  Yuck!  Nasty things, nasty! We hates them, we do!

> You don't see stuff like this:

Wait, you see stuff like that? Why? I mean, unless you *want* to.

Anyway, we all know what this comes down to: people are different.
Forums and mailing lists are different. Some people like the advantages
of one, some like the advantages of the other. Some in one group see the
advantages of the other as a disadvantage.

To those migrating to the forums: have fun! We love you in spirit, if
not in technology. To those staying... uh, when is that durn DVD gonna
come out?

Troy

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