I agree pretty strongly with Jason's viewpoint, and for the very same reasons. Not against a web forum, but other options (such as web forum) ought to be additional as opposed to in place of. Mailing lists might be "showing their age", but that's because they work. Procmail + Alpine works great, or an NNTP client is also perfectly fine. For people who want web access, there are web interfaces (like Nabble). ------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 12:13:59 +1100 From: Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> Reply-To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] FreeSWITCH Mailing List - Why not a forum? Ben Langfeld <ben@langfeld.co.uk> wrote:
There may be a forum, but such a thing cannot be expected to succeed if there's competition with an already established list. Such a thing would have to replace the mailing list to succeed. I believe this would help the FreeSWITCH effort amongst newer users and lead to much faster growth. The barrier to entry of a mailing list is a tad too high for some since it presents an impression, justified or not, that the list is where the elite hang out and is off-limits for newbies, whereas with a tidier forum setup that would allow for a "Newbies Corner" might avoid this. Mailing lists are showing their age these days - as demonstrated by the difficulty in responding to this on digest mode - I have to strip away every other thread first.
Experienced users of mailing lists don't use digest mode. They filter the mailing list into its own mail folder and use features of their mail user agent to read it efficiently, e.g., threaded display. I support to the existence of a Web interface to the mailing list, but I would strongly object to any attempt to replace the list with a "Web forum", for a number of reasons. In particular, if this were to happen, I know that I would find it difficult to participate, perhaps impossible. With a mailing list, I have a choice of software with which to read it, and I have chosen carefully based on my accessibility needs and personal preferences so that I can read and interact with mail efficiently. The problem with a Web forum is that I have no choice: I would have to use a Web-based interface to read and post messages, moreover, a Web interface provided by the forum itself. Unfortunately, Web interfaces can't match my customized mail environment for productivity; some of them are highly inaccessible to people with disabilities, and they don't offer the flexibility of choosing and customizing one's own client software that mailing lists and NNTP newsgroups provide. Web fora are slow and difficult for me to use, at best, and impossible at worst, and I doubt that I am alone here. So, I'm in favour of a Web interface but strongly against anything that wouldn't also allow mailing list participation or offer NNTP access. That is, I'm in favour of diversity and opposed to excluding people by forcing everyone to use a single user interface - one provided by forum software. _______________________________________________ FreeSWITCH-users mailing list FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users http://www.freeswitch.org