[mb-style] Mailing list/forum dissonance

[Mark Woodson]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 5:35 PM, monxton <musicbrainz at jordan-maynard.org> wrote:
> On 01/02/2011 13:28, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
>>
>> May I suggest gmane?
>>
>> It already mirrors many musicbrainz mailing lists, -style  for example:
>> <http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.musicbrainz.style>.
>>
>> It offers an RSS feed for the messages, an old-style frame interface and
>> a blog-like interface. You can send messages to the mailing list from
>> gmane's interfaces. In addition it has a series of quite strong
>> anti-spam measures.
>
> I love gmane, and I am currently reading this discussion, and posting,
> using a newsreader. I do this mainly because it allows me to get through
> a lot of different lists in an efficient and consistent way. Any
> newsreader is much faster than a forum interface for selecting and
> processing threads of interest.
>
> But gmane (or nabble) is never going to be attractive to people who only
> know and understand the bulletin-board type forum interface of phpBB,
> vBulletin or similar programs. If we want these discussions to be used
> by less technical people, then we should drop the lists and embrace the
> forums. Sad but true.

That's depressing. I much prefer the mailing list format. The added
time required in having to go to a forum instead of dealing with my
inbox would mean that I'd end up not participating most likely.

There must be a forum that combines a list style interface, or list
that provides a forum interface. A quick Google isn't turning anything
up, but it does show that there has been rather a lot of hand wringing
over this very issue of list vs. forum.

-Mark / InSinU8