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On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 04:28:00PM +0000, Gordon Henderson wrote: > On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, John Clarke wrote: > > > is there a website forum for this list ? > > Just wondered if there is, where is it? > > if there isn't - is there a reason why not ? > > seems like the list would lend itself to that nicely... > > Forums are the work of the devil for those who can't type nor use a decent > email program. > > Sorry to be blunt, but I hate forums and only use them when I'm absolutely > forced into it. > > I have the means to sort, search, file and otherwise handle email using my > preferred platforms - forums are slow, clunky, bloaty and otherwise > unwieldy compared to my super fast, lightweight and slick email system. > > I used to run many mailing lists - and fortunately, a few still remain. I > watched them be taken over by forums and the overall quality of postings > dropped dramatically. Rather than one of 2 specialist mailing lists (Scuba > related - another passion of mine), now there are dozes of forums and it's > impossible to track all of them. One, I even host a dedicated server for > and I'm utterly gob-smacked at the bandwidth it uses - especially on the > incoming side - punters are sitting there hitting reload, reload, reload, > reload, Ooh, a posting, best post a 2-line reply... reload, reload, > reload, reload, .. etc. Lifes too short. > > Email comes to me, I can deal with it when I need to, I have a decent > editor, not some bloated javascript POS, etc. blah, blah. Hm, are you reading my mind? This is exactly my argument in favour of mailing lists (or one of them, anyway) -- I don't have to remember to check back every so often to see if there's an answer, it just ends up in my mail directory. I'm on dozens of mailing lists -- a couple of LUGs, quite a few Debian ones, and various others. I'd hate to have to check dozens of websites on a daily (or even weekly) basis just to keep up with them. I hate forums with a passion. They do nothing that mailing lists or Usenet don't do, and they do it in a way that locks you into a single interface. If you must do this sort of thing, a web interface to a newsgroup or mailing list would be the best solution. They also seem to be a common source of security problems - everybody writes their own forum, reinventing the wheel and full of the same SQL injection and XSS problems as all the others. -- Benjamin M. A'Lee || mail: bma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx web: http://subvert.org.uk/~bma/ || gpg: 0xBB6D2FA0 -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html