[A6] mailing list, forums, etc. (was Re: New host?!?)

[Will Yardley]

David Evans wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 07:31:34AM -0400, Susan Baird wrote:

> > Regarding how we communicate, I've come to really like the emails
> > but I can go either way. I also like forums. For purposes of
> > updating the T&T, it is much easier to download a monthly archive
> > and go through it as one document than to sort through a forum of
> > posts. So I would definitely like to keep that function no matter
> > what else we do please.
 
> Another advantage of the mailing list approach is that it allows
> external archiving.  We've seen more than one occasion where this is
> tremendously useful.

The main thing I see that's wrong with a forum is that it would likely
divide the group further. The mailing list is already relatively small
(and on focus). I don't think there's really enough people for both to
co-exist happily, at least without some sort of bidirectional gateway.

I'm not an A6 owner, and don't read the list that often, but my
impression is that the list is pretty on focus and is helpful to a
number of people; my personal $0.02 is that having an online forum /
bulletin board would be too divisive.

> I'm sure that there's software to do this.  My idea would be to have
> the mailing list and the web forum be different "views" into the same
> messages.  I think we can do this.

I'm not so sure. I am not aware of any really good software that does
this; I'm told that yahoo groups works sort of like that.

One problem is that the conventions for posting to a forum are different
(in terms of quoting, message format, etc.). It would be hard to
translate between the two. Mail and news is a little easier to do
there's a lot of software, including mailman, which can do bidirectional
mail <-> news gatewaying.

> > The advantage of a forum is that you can see 
> > an entire thread without having to download an archive.

you mean like this?
http://roland.code404.com/pipermail/a6/2004-August/thread.html

-- 
Will Yardley
will at code404.com