Jim Lesurf <
no...@audiomisc.co.uk> wrote:
> Yes. I've noticed that others have taken that 'choice', and decided there
> is not much point in saying that they would perfer an alternative to be
> available.. I've also largely given up trying to question the way people
> have resigned themselves to 'going with the flow'. But I thought it worth
> at least raising the issue in the hope people would actually think about
> it. And even realise it is quite possible for a 'forum' to also parallel as
> something like an email list. So give more genuine 'choice'. Alas, many
> minds seem closed.
I'll reply to your similar point from the RPCEmu mailing list, to avoid
derailing that list.
Can I be the first to say that I'm not keen on forums, and much prefer the
user interface of Usenet. However...
'Choice' depends what you're trying to do. Businesses publish phone
numbers, fax numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, websites, Facebook,
Twitter, etc, etc because this is a 1:1 conversation. You ask a question,
someone replies. In that case the medium doesn't matter. And also there's
usually someone paying for people to respond to all these media.
But most of what we're discussing here is a group conversation. Now, group
conversations down the pub are great, and if you don't like one pub you can
find another - nobody's insisting there's only one place you can discuss
something. If you want to banter, that's fine.
However, what we're doing is more like project management. If you're trying
to keep a team up to date with what's going on, having a single conversation
rather than dozens of separate ones means everyone is up to speed. So that
means a way any voice can be heard by all participants.
So, if you want to have that sort of conversation you need to keep it in one
medium, or media that are easily converted (an email to post gateway
wouldn't work very well).
Now, some advantage of forums for 'project management' type goals:
1. All relevant material is kept together where it's possible to
exhaustively read it if you so desire
2. The ability to subdivide the topic up into really specific areas, and be
able to only read what you're interested in.
3. The ability to have slow-burning threads on those specific areas (eg one
post per month) without them getting swamped by busier threads
4. The easy ability to refer to threads from years back that might still be
relevant
5. The ability to read any thread without any commitment (login,
subscription, etc)
6. The tendency to stay focused on the topic of discussion, rather than
random thread drift (great for the pub, not so great for a business meeting)
The biggest flaw is that forums are really terrible for following on a
regular basis. RSS helps here, thought it isn't perfect.
There's nothing here that can't be done with private newsgroups, mailing
lists with filtering of Subject: headers, etc, etc. But it means each
reader has to do quite a bit of work to get it set up nicely, whereas on a
forum a lot of the work only has to be done once. I have the ability to
create mail to news gateways, and read lots of mailing lists as newsgroups.
But I just don't do it, because life's too short. If there was some way to
distribute a settings file that would set up a user's mail/news client with
all these tweaks that would be great, but there isn't. And so the system
falls down because most other people aren't going to spend ages setting up
the system to their exact preferences. Simply downloading an NNTP client
these days is too much for many people.
So we are where we are. If anyone feels like implementing something to
improve the situation (not talking about implementing it, actually getting
on with it), feel free. It isn't something we can work on ourselves as time
for many of us is short, and we have more pressing priorities - like
actually getting RISC OS on Raspberry Pi out the door.
Theo