Quoting Svante Signell (svante.signell@???):

> (personally I heavily dislike forums :( Why not use plain email and
> publish stuff on web pages??)

I _tend_ to share your view, but we should always beware of what I call
FirstThursdayism. If I were really mean, I'd call it McLoughlinism,
but I'm trying to be nice. Time for a story....


Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I was editor of the 40 page monthly
magazine _Blue Notes_ for San Francisco PC User Group. SFpcUG had a
talent for committing interesting organisational errors in a large and
creative variety of ways, and I always looked forward with eager
anticipation to the next one. (I immortalised one such anecdote about
SFpcUG politics in the Linux User Group HOWTO,
http://linuxmafia.com/lug/User-Group-HOWTO-7.html#ss7.4 .)

One time, SFpcUG President Tom McLoughlin was trying to figure out what
was the best day of the week for the monthly meeting. (I try not to
mock Tom. He's a nice guy, and was trying to do the right thing for
members.) Tom dealt with his statistical sampling problem, thus:

1. Convene the current first Thursday meeting at the current location.
2. Ask how many members in attendence like first Thursdays.

Trying not to smile, I gently pointed out his unquestioned assumption
that the subset of the membership present on the meeting was
sufficiently representative of the whole. In particular, I said, it's
entirely possible that people present on first Thursdays have a higher
than average likelihood of finding first Thursdays convenient, and, if
he'd asked a second Wednesdays crowd the same question, he'd be
astonished at how much they tended to prefer that.

A high proportion of people on mailing lists think mailing lists are great.
A high proportion of people on Web forums think Web forums are great.

Parties in my back yard are of course better than both, according to
a poll of people attending parties in my back yard.