[WikiEN-l] Silly mailing lists

Thu Jun 23 14:34:06 UTC 2005

On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 04:43:37AM -0700, thomas-edison at ziplip.com wrote:
> Mailing lists are just so inefficient.... why not just have a forum?

Mailing lists (and newsgroups) have some real advantages over Web
forums.

First off, everyone gets to choose what software they want to use to
read mail in, whereas a Web forum means that everyone has to use the
same software (namely, the forum software itself) even if it doesn't fit
their needs.  If you want to read a mailing list in a Web browser, you
can use the Web archives (as you linked) or use a Webmail system such as
Gmail.  But those of us who want to read the list in a dedicated mail
client like mutt or Thunderbird can do that too.  We can apply
spam-filters to the list traffic to block out an unwanted thread if we
like.  We can get digest mode.  We can use a real text editor to compose
messages, not a browser TEXTAREA widget.  So a mailing list offers more
choices.

Second, most Web forum software has *remarkably poor* support for a lot
of really basic discussion features, such as threading, quoting, and
catching-up.  Considering that the idea of threaded online discussions
has been around for a couple of decades now (Usenet is 25 this year),
you'd think that someone who was going to implement it anew would learn
from (say) mail clients and Usenet newsreader software?  But no, not
particularly.  Most forum software groups messages into "topics", not
threads -- distinguished by the fact that a "topic" has a single root
message and doesn't fork.  Real discussions, of course, *do* fork, so
Web forums poorly model the behavior of their users.  Moreover, "topics"
get unwieldy after 50 or so messages, leading forum administrators to
pound on their users to "start a new topic" because the old one is
"full".  Huh?  A thread doesn't get full.

Also, how is it that Web forum software such as phpBB and DCForum can
get so popular without having something as basic as a feature to
reliably catch up on unread messages, or to view messages sorted by
different criteria?  Sure, there's usually a feature to see which topics
*have* unread messages, but when there's a dozen topics each of 100+
posts, catching up across the whole forum is slow and irritating.  In
contrast, every mail client in the world can tell you which messages
you've read and which you haven't -- and many can distinguish "message
that has been presented to you in the message list, but you never
actually looked at" from "message that you have never seen at all
before".

-- 
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>