[WikiEN-l] Silly mailing lists

Thu Jun 23 14:45:48 UTC 2005

On 6/23/05, Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu> wrote:
> 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>
> 

For once, this is on-topic. I would recommend Gmail for mailing lists.
Personally, I like keeping WikiEN and other reasonably high-volume
mailing lists away from my primary email account.

Also, the threading, while not perfect, is great for a web based
system, and the automatic/user-controlled collapsing/expansion of
quoted text is fantastic. Ditto for read messages in the thread - all
available while reading the most recent messages.

One never has to worry about deleting messages or unwanted threads
either (it's no harm to just leave it - as you'll never run out of
space!) Also the search facility is very prompt compared to in-client
searching of downloaded mail.

I found it to be a good way of experiencing Gmail whilst not wanting
to use Gmail for my personal mail.

Zoney
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