[TxMt] Re: Actual Forum?

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


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


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin)

iEYEARECAAYFAkiQ22QACgkQRgz/WHNxCGpNPgCfbphnmbwl3OMEFjj0uckUKe+e
s9EAnRcv/QTfF9vIM6mDpb1mBKi1cy9s
=hZfX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----