Re: Mailing list vs. forum - WAS: Re: [pygame] Question about .bmp files and transparency

["bob@threeoh.com" <bob@threeoh.com>]

On Wednesday, Sep 10, 2003, at 06:48 America/New_York, R. Alan Monroe 
wrote:

> > Another thing.. Are there any specific reason for having a mailinglist
> > and not forum/message board(s)?
> Personally I don't care for web forums because the screen is covered
> with wall-to-wall crap like sigs, avatars, buttons, ads, etc. (leaving
> very little room for actual content, which is usually in some hard to
> read color) They are slow to load, too. I'll take plain ascii email
> any day, which only needs two buttons (next message and reply) and
> loads instantly.
A newsgroup is really the right medium for this, but nobody uses news 
readers anymore.  There is http://gmane.org/ though, as pete mentioned 
(while I was writing).

IMHO (off the top of my head)

mailing list:
	pros -
		easy to use clients
		easy to contact people off-list
		local mirror of as much as you want that works reliably offline 
(email client willing)
		you still get a searchable web archive
		you can cross-post to multiple email lists (i.e. 
pygame-users@seul.org and pythonmac-sig@python.org)
		everyone else (wrt open source, esp python) uses mailing lists and/or 
newsgroups, not forums
		spell checker
	cons -
		not all email clients are created equal wrt threading, sorting, 
searching
		lots of duplicate emails (reply-to-all is common for some lists, but 
not this one b/c of the reply-to: header)
		spam (but you get this anyway)

forums:
	pros -
		the web archives are usually a bit nicer, but this is a solvable 
problem for mailing lists
		you don't necessarily expose yourself to spam
	cons -
		missing all the pros of email
		inconsistent user interface
		separate credentials for every forum

-bob