As i recommended to tomos, phpbb is the best open source (GNU) out there (
phpbb.com). I
will use
their bb to illustrate counterpoints:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote:
1) Mailing lists are, by their very nature,
decentralized. Any post is
replicated on hundreds of machines. This automatic replication makes
censorship very hard and a total loss of data unlikely.
Whatever. paranoia.
backups?
2) Archives like the ones generated by Mailman can be imported into email
clients and searched locally at high speed. I have frequently made use of
that feature to build high quality archives. The search function of most
BBS systems, on the other hand, is far from optimal (I've seen many BBS
which claimed to have a search, but where this search never worked).
phpbb is solid and well tested for years now:
http://phpbb.com/phpBB/search.php
3) Mailing lists keep a track record. It is easy and fast to see all posts
by a particular member, or everything written by yourself. With a BBS, you
first have to figure out if such a feature exists, then wait for the
server to perform some search. Server is down? Too bad, you'll never get
that post you wrote 3 months ago now.
http://phpbb.com/phpBB/search.php?search_author=theFinn
4) Mailing lists allow everyone to participate without
a free online
connection. In many developing nations, Internet access is paid by the
minute, and reading and replying to posts online costs money. Mailing
lists can be conveniently read, responded to and archived offline.
you can 'watch' topics via email with phpbb. And i could easily hack in a
reply-via-email option.
There are many bbs/mailing lists out there...
5) Mailing lists allow the use of a variety of email
clients which all
have advantages and disadvantages. Everyone can use the software of their
choice, with a user interface that suits them, without being forced to
make use of an arbitrary web interface. This is of importance to
handicapped users, for whom special email clients exist.
and special
web-browsers....you wouldnt believe how much complaint of "aural" goes on in
the
mozilla.
6) Good email clients make quoting and threading
transparent and easy to
use. They interpret the reference ID in a message and thereby allow you to
quickly navigate to the parent post that a message has responded to.
Quoting and writing within a real text editor is also a lot more
convenient than writing within a browser window.
http://phpbb-hpmods.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/posting.php?mode=reply&t=34
Thats my bb on sourceforge for a patch i made a while ago... try the [quote] feature, its
quite
clean.
7) Bulletin board systems are slow. This is related to 4) -- in a BBS I
have to wait for each individual thread to load, for the "post reply"
screen to load, for sorting options to affect my display etc. -- as with
all web interfaces, you have a high additional latency as every aspect of
the interface is generated "on demand".
I agree flat out.
8) Bulletin board systems have a higher noise level. They allow no easy
client-side filtering, as many email clients do. Many BBS encourage the
use of fonts, pictures, animated smileys, overlong signatures etc., often
leading to very hard to read threads.
A good administrator of phpbb can produce very clean sites. Its very configurable and
skinable
9) Every BBS is different. Everyone is familiar with email, but learning
to use a BBS always requires making yourself familiar with its particular
user interface and functionality.
You must not have heard of phpbb...it has quite an active development community both on
the web,
and on
irc.freenode.net #phpbb
10) Mailing lists can be easily moderated, even in groups. BBS usually
have after-the-fact moderation, where individual posts are censored or
threads are locked. On a mailing list, posts can be pre-approved and
individual members banned. With a BBS that does not use some ID
confirmation method, we'll have the same banning problem we have on
Wikipedia proper -- totally open access is not always a good thing. And if
email confirmation is required, this only advantage of a web-based BBS
goes away.
??? wikipedia has groups, individual user permissions, and IP based blacklisting...
Now its my turn.
phpbb allows for structure of topics. This would easily allow it to become the talk
section for
each article on top of its other duties.
as you can see from
http://phpbb.com/phpBB/ there are 500,000 articles, well more than
wikipedia
;-) and 160 users online at the time im writing this. you tell me of the performance?
However, if we can find a file-based bb that allows structure and is well developed, then
that
would be ideal.
Im also not aggressively inclined toward having a bbs, i just wanted to shed some light.
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