On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 23:34:48 +0200
Svante Signell <svante.signell@???> wrote:


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

A mailing list is like vendors shipping to your house.

Forums are like calling 15 stores to see whether they have any orders
for you yet.

When you sign up for a mailman type mailing list, you don't promise to
do squat.

When you sign up for a forum, you typically sign a 2000 word terms of
service with an indemnification such that if a third party sues the
forum vendor for something you allegedly did, your house is on the
line. And of course every forum has its own unique terms of service,but
they all have indemnifications, just different types.

When someone responds to one of your old mailing list posts, the
response comes to you, in context, ready to reply.

When somebody responds to your old post on a forum, you get an email
and have to remember your password to sign onto the forum. You have to
find the old post and figure out its context.

So far I've spoken of forums the way they existed in the 20th century.
There's a special place in hell for those advocating a free software
project go through a proprietary middleman like Google, Facebook,
Meetup, LinkedIn or Yahoo for forum-like activities (groups). When they
do that, I resign from the group and find a new one. There's always
another group when one goes to the proprietary dark side.

Invariably, when a mailinglist converts to a forum, especially one of
the new breed of oh-so-hip proprietary middlemen, conversation drops
off to a trickle, although Dev1 Galaxy seems to be doing better than a
trickle.

And then there's this: Forums are like those nice little loyal customer
savings fobs that every retailer gives you to put on your keyring to
get discounts. But that's just it. Every retailer. You end up with a
keyring with 4 keys and 100 fobs, bulging out of your pants. Heck, at
least the fobs don't require a password like forums do. I can't join
a forum for every, or even 1/10, of the excellent mailing lists to
which I belong. So whose forum should I choose, Devuan, Supervision,
GoLUG, Trilug, Inkscape, Publishers-Forum, Vim, VimOutliner, DIYPython,
Leo, or the 20 other excellent LUG lists to which I belong? Evvverybody
thinks theirs is the best and worth extra effort, but really, they're
all good and the ones demanding extra attention are more of a problem
than a solution.

There's a reason mailing lists and chat do well: All your passwords are
handled by the client (or in the case of a mailing list, not at all).


SteveT

Steve Litt
July 2017 featured book: Quit Joblessness: Start Your Own Business
http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz