Quoting Gregory Nowak (greg@???):

> As for this new discourse thing ... I'm not a fan of forums, unless
> it's a community I really want to be a part of, and forum is the only
> way to participate. I much prefer to have e-mails end up in my inbox,
> than to have to login somewhere, and look through what accumulated
> since I last checked in.

In my experience, people who've been around the Internet for a while
try using Web forums, and find over time that:

o Postings you made many years ago on mailing lists still exist and are
findable via Web search, whereas ones one you posted to Web forums were
wiped out three site redesigns ago.

o Or, failing that, you still have a copy of what you posted in your
saved mail and can rehost it on the Web trivially, as I've done with
many of the entries on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/

o Whereas you almost never have a local copy of what you posted to some
now vanished Web forum. I mean, you _could_ have, but you didn't.
(In rare cases where you did, you can end up with things like
'User Agent' on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Web/ . That's a preserved
page from a Twiki instance that suddenly vanished without plan or
notice one day, and fortuntely I'd made a local copy.

Said Twiki site was, ironically, maintained by a community (IWEThey)
that left InfoWorld Electric (IWE) in disgust after yet another
Web forum redesign had erased everyone's existing threads. (IWEThey,
itself, no longer exists because it was kiled by the Gods of Irony:
It collapsed because of problems with the Web forum software.)

o Web forums have nothing anywhere near as effective as a MUA killfile
(though some of them have efforts that at least try), in helping
individual participants simply not see the threads or participants
who they consider not worth their time.

o _Many_ Web forums (I certainly assume Devuan's is an exception) have
a problem of hypercontrol by control-freak administrators, e.g.,
excessive content control, invisible banning, etc. While mailing
lists can suffer this syndrome too, there's a key difference:
Members of a mailing list community can communicate with each other
about administrative practices out-of-band, because they have each
others' e-mail addresses. Web forum denizens, by conrast, have no
such recourse.

The characteristic hypercontrol on _many_ (not all) Web forums is
probably in part a consequence of the lack of anything as effective
as MUA killfiles, which puts greater pressure on administrators to
apply centralised social control with less cause (than is typically
the case on mailing lists).


Probably because of these inherent characteristics, _especially_ (IMO)
the first of those, in general (and in my long experience) technically
proficient people seldom use Web forums at all -- such that, if there
were an annual award for Worst Linux Technical Advice, it would be won
year after year by ubuntuforums.org. (That's the place where you go to
be advised to use proprietary drivers even in situations where the open
source ones are markedly better, in particular.)


All that having been said, people who love Web forums really love them,
and it's important that they be happy, too. As Mr. Lincoln said, 'It's
the sort of thing that will be enjoyed by those who enjoy that sort of
thing.'

-- 
Cheers,                        My pid is Inigo Montoya.  You kill -9    
Rick Moen                      my parent process.  Prepare to vi.
rick@???
McQ!  (4x80)