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On 30 Jul 2008, at 5:40 pm, Fritz Anderson wrote:
Let me add to the head count (Lord knows I can't match the volume) on this.
(FYI, I'm now wearing my serious hat again here, for avoidance of doubt)
I greatly prefer a mailing list, especially for a topic like TextMate, which is well-defined and comparatively low-traffic. Most of the traffic is interesting. If the topic were something like "DSL service," with its exponential variants of vendor, hardware, locale, usage... then a searchable, hierarchical knowledge base makes sense. This list doesn't come close to those requirements.
I concur. Forums seem to be a slightly bastard child of mailing list and wiki - they're a bit clunky for actual *discussion*, with their value lying more in the threads that get archived for future finding.
Mailing lists have been criticised for searchabality - most have archives, some have searchable archives, but that side of them is a bit hidden away compared to the main discussion interface; I often find mailing list archives when I google for information, and then have to spend a bit of time stepping through irrelevant replies to the email with the question to conclude what the answer was. With forums, due to the active moderation (they seem to need a LOT more moderation effort), good responses seem to be gathered manually into persistent places.
A pretty sweet combination, I think, is a mailing list plus a wiki, so the wiki can function as a community-managed FAQ list for the long term stuff, while the discussion happens on a mailing list. I see mailing list archives are more useful for going back and looking at the discussion that led to a conclusion for historic purposes than for actually being a repository of knowledge; they're too full of noise for that.
Forums are more accessible, certainly. Less technical people find a forum more approachable than a mailing list. It's the endless tradeoff in UI design - easy to get started versus easy to keep using; it's hard to have both. I think there's work to be done in hybrid systems that have email *and* web-based interfaces to the same discussion with decent integration to a wiki (eg, making it easy to link to postings from the wiki and vice versa, much like how trac nicely merges wiki/tickets/svn).
But because of this, we do have a generation who have grown up comfortable with forums and thus find a mailing list a bit strange purely due to unfamiliarity, much like how somebody who learnt to program in Perl and has done so for years will almost always, if forced to work in another language for a few weeks, quickly come to the definite conclusion that the other language is an absolute pile of unusable tripe.
Now, we can we get onto a more constructive discussion... such as how to set the Reply-To headers? :-)
ABS
- -- Alaric Snell-Pym Work: http://www.snell-systems.co.uk/ Play: http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/ Blog: http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/?author=4