Hans-Jörg Bibiko wrote:
By my opinion that's point. What's the main difference between a forum and a mailing list? Actually I don't see a difference.
There's no difference, but you're against forums.
Why should we
change it thus? Mailing lists are in some sense clean structured without any fancy stuff and ads.
Ads are an orthogonal issue. You can have ads on mailing lists or no ads on forums.
<forum>If you like a forum-like view switch to view threaded or use an app which can displayed it.</forum>
I'm looking at this thing using Nabble right now because mailing lists are horrible/impossible to reply to in digest mode. (Digest mode also ironically gives you ten copies of everything because each message tends to include a huge chunk of the preceding thread, but at least it's not ten separate messages.)
Nabble definitely sucks ... but a proper forum wouldn't (suck as much).
I'm not saying forums don't suck, they just suck less.
The next point is if you want to follow a discussion on a mobile
device (like my iPhone) it is much easier to use a mailing list than to browse to a forum.
Only if the forum isn't set up for iPhone access, and even then it's arguable.
Then it's often the case that forums allow to
create sub-categories to be "clearly arranged". But this could lead to be confusing, and sometimes I do not know where to post my question.
Right and there's only four mailing lists to pick from. You can make a forum equally disorganized or not, your choice.
Furthermore I'm often in areas of the world where I have limited
access to the internet and with a very low bandwidth.
And it's a joy to have to download all that extra email when you've got extra low bandwidth. Especially if you subscribe to, I dunno, more than one mailing list.
In order to follow a list I'm using the good old UNIX pine to read my mails
without any fancy images etc.
Yes, I know when I'm in a remote area with limited bandwidth, being able to keep up with mailing lists using pine is my top priority.
And regarding to Google groups. Well, these are not bad, but you find
the word "Google" in it. What happens if Google will become insolvent ;)
Good point. Use a proper forum.