On 170712-21:59-0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Steve Litt (slitt@???):
>
> > 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.
>
> I may have to FAQ this on my Web site, because it keeps coming up.
>
> 1. There are far greater social and technical factors that motivate /
> create an incentive towards strong, centralised content control on Web
> forums, with the result that
> regimes of active moderation and retromoderation are much more common,

                              ^ ^ ^  
                              | | |

> hence the result tends to be
> more strongly stifled by the admins than on mailing lists. (I can
> picture my friend Steve Litt rising to complain about debian-user,
> and can only say 'Hold that thought, Steve.')
>
> 2. In particular, because on Web forums there is (typically) nothing
> anywhere near as effective as are killfiles (old school, e.g., mutt) or
> scorefiles (new school, e.g., emacs Gnus) available to participants to
> avoid seeing what/who annoys them, instead the forum admins are under
> greater social pressure to enforce social conformity against everyone,
> with stifling results.
>
> In case the contrast between the two models is not obvious, note this
> statement of policy at Silicon Valley Linux User Group for its mailing
> lists, which may be a more stark expression of attitude than most but
> I would maintain reflects an ethos common among mailing list admins:
>
> SVLUGs' listadmins normally intervene only to ensure lists' technical
> operation, to halt spam (incontrovertible spam, not postings someone
> merely dislikes), and to halt major eruptions of offtopic spew.
> Enforcement if any should always be minimal and public. (We don't do
> backroom politics, and our preferred means of social control is to help
> everyone apply his/her own well-tuned killfile.)
>
> http://www.svlug.org/policies/list-policy.php
>
> (Necessary disclaimer: I wrote that, codifying consensus among the
> active volunteers and SVLUG tradition.)
>
>
> 3. It is relatively difficult (or at least requires non-default
> anticipatory action) to independently preserve local copies of one's Web
> forum postings against the (strong) possibility of that Web forum
> folding up its tent in the night and disappearing. By contrast, I
> still have automatically made archival copies of my outgoing posts to
> mailing lists and newsgroups going all the way back to the 1980s, and
> have in some cases HTMLised those a decade or two later to create
> articles for my http://linuxmafia.com/kb/ knowledgebase. By contrast,
> the Web forum posts I've lavished time on since the mid-1990s have
> pretty nearly all vanished when those forums suddenly went away without
> advance notice.
>
> 4. Which reminds me: Web forums have over the decades since the 1990s
> tended, disproportionately to get clobbered (to suddenly die, to vanish
> off the Web, to go 'Poof!') without notice. Sometimes, this is caused
> by a corporation hiring some new Web weenie who decides to make a name
> for himself/herself by jettisoning everything the prior Web weenie did
> including choice of Web forum software -- and the new Web weenie feels
> not the slightest obligation to port over to the new implementation
> anything people posted to the existing forums. That's merely 'Web
> content', and, if the suckers who wrote that valued what they wrote, why
> did they post it onto a corporation's proprietary forum without charge?
> So, all existing content gets blown away without a second thought.
> Denizens of InfoWorld Electric went through this process twice before
> some of us learned the obvious lesson. The third iteration was a
> ghost-town. (I'm sure Web weenie #3 trotted out a fluent excuse for
> IDG/Infoworld management, explaining the sudden lack of participants +
> traffic.)
>
> In that regard, it's probably significant that it's pretty easy to carry
> forward archives and membership rosters from one host to its replacement
> or from (e.g.) majordomo to Sympa to Mailman, because the underlying
> data formats are stable and commoditised. Web forums, not.
>
> 5. Web forums have poor presence in Web search prominence and archives
> like Wayback Machine / Internet Archive. (In fairness and in contrast,
> crowdsourced knowledgebase sites like StackExchange are uncommonly good
> in those areas.)
>
> 6. In part because of the relative difficulty of preserving local
> copies of one's posts, in part because of the no-killfiles problem,
> and in part because of the webmasters-blowing-everything-away problem,
> and in part because of poor search presence, experienced computer users
> are more likely than not to prefer mailing lists / newsgroups over Web
> forums, which in turn impairs the latter's percentage of well-informed
> users _in general_ (with honourable exceptions such as, I assume,
> http://dev1galaxy.org/ ). Which in turn is a further disincentive for
> experienced users to participate.
>
> 7. Mailing lists and newsgroups benefit, substantially from an
> established user culture that pretty well supports substantive
> discussion. Web forums, not so well.
>
> All IMO and in my experience, of course.
>
All of the arguments above are true, and if there is any bias by the author,
it's minimal.

Rick's analysis is superb. And I couldn't even try if I wanted to, for
insufficient resources (referring to my aptitude), and for lack of time, to
reply up to his standards.

But some of the arguments given apply, in different manner, to mailing lists.

E.g.: try visit: https://gmane.org/

Type Devuan in the search box. You will likely still get only:

(manually creating quote; ah formating in Forums is a good thing)
>
> Attribution: Conrad Poirier [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
>

>                                                Not all of Gmane is back yet -
>                                                We're working hard to restore
>                                                everything

And yet I do agree ML are generally more durable, and do not depend of admin's
whim like phpBB, i.e. forums, do.

What I liked best in his (future?; pls give us the link once it's done)
[future] FAQ is:
> regimes of active moderation and retromoderation are much more common,

So true. I'm still banned from Gentoo Forums (also because I never asked to be
back; I didn't feel I was to blame in the least). And that was a "regime of
active moderation" and also with a tint of "retromoderation" believe you me...
But I'm not going to go in the details of it. I prefer coming back some day.
Hi, Gentoo Forum users, I hope things will change with admins in charge, just
like there is no more hidious porn like it was there for years (what a
fascistic liberal decision to allow that by admins and leadership!), and that
better people will come to be in charge of Gentoo generally! I wish to be back
to a better Gentoo some day. And there are great people there, have always
been!

I prefer to tell you how some people are very likely currently actively testing
OpenRC, and doing so because they've been encouraged by that Dev1Galaxy topic,
as the views have gone up and currently are beyond 300. Last time I mentioned
the views in this thread ( of bad subject, you can't deny that, can you? ;
there's an argument for the forums people, right?, no need to explain it,
obvious to all the participants here )

OTOH, the possiblity to test OpenRC have been available for at least one month
in this ML.

[Last time I mentioned the views in this thread], and I was already waiting,
IIRC, for an antire afternoon or morning's worth of time, for replies, they
were only 43:
   Linkname: Re: [DNG] I have a question about libsystemd0 in devuan ascii,
        URL: https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20170710.181500.2edfa007.en.html
and it's about 60 views since only yesterday, after I corrected the "download
page"...

---
CORRECTION the link that I sent yesterday missed the final "6"
By the way, here it is for other readers of this ML:
   Linkname: OpenRC installation in Devuan Ascii / Installation / Dev1 Galaxy Forum
        URL: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=3286#p3286
CORRECTION DONE

And also the download page I should add so readers here need not go to forums:

https://www.croatiafidelis.hr/foss/Devuan-OpenRC/
---

More arguments in favor of forums. Can you correct any typoes you make in your
emails? Like, can I correct the above straight in the archived email...
Rethorical question. But I'm sure you know what I mean: forums *are* editable!

And the looks? Well, Lurker is absolutely marvelous, but most other ML
archivers are not as great. (Lurker needs some patching... such as losing the
subject even when you reply to email correctly, just because you added a
[SOLVED] at the front or back of the Subject string... Bad!)...

But still, can you get in Mailing Lists what in phpFlux (or pls. supply the
correct name of program used on Dev1Galaxy) or in phpBB and such, which offer
to forum users what is similar to plain HTML so they can add colors, can you
add a nice four colors notice/quote/manually-copied-text --in a mail-- that
says:

OpenRC 0.23 is starting up Linux 4.9.33-unofficial+grsec170708-18 (x86_64)
(of course not able to reproduce it here)

as you can see in:
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=1128#p3236
(link already given above)

Or can you get an avatar in the ML? Sure you can, just include it in an
attachment... Or go HTML bleh... Of couse I'm being a bit ironic. But we're all
kids even when we're 60 yrs old like I am, and I like the nice looking
Dev1Galaxy a lot.

DIGRESSION follows.
I even like the fonts too, but, golinux, do you know that they're allegedly (by
Google, that's why I said "even"; if they were true FOSS opensource, which
Google never has been nor is expected to be, I would just love them) gzip'd,
but..

[Do you know] the Google fonts used on Dev1Galaxy are [allegedly gzip'd], but
can not be really extracted with gunzip. From traffic dump, I'm saying... What
Google puts in there can be anything, even some aid in there witchcraft-like
methods and tools to intrude into people's machine :( .
DIGRESSION finished.

Then, could I have gone with all the testing that I did on that forum topic
here on the ML? Like setting up:

# cat /etc/apt/apt.conf
Debug::pkgProblemResolver "on";
#Debug::pkgDPkgPM "on";
Debug::Acquire::ftp "on";
Debug::Acquire::http "on";
Debug::Acquire::gpgv "on";
Debug::BuildDeps "on";
Debug::Hashes "on";
InstallProgress::Fancy "off";
Binary::apt::DPkg::Progress-Fancy "off";
AllowInsecureRepositories "off";
#

and then pasting all the output. Could I have?

No! No, sorry, I couldn't comforably have done so... But it fits there,
packages could have not installed correctly, and then it would have been
useful, and is even now, to lesser extent, there.

And there are a few more arguments in favor of forums vs maillists.

À chacun son goût!
De gustibus non es disputandum!

Users have the choice of both!

Regards!
--
Miroslav Rovis
Zagreb, Croatia
https://www.CroatiaFidelis.hr