[mb-users] Re: Bulletin Boards, yet another discussion?! :)

[Sami Sundell]

On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 10:53:19AM -0700, Robert Kaye wrote:

I'm answering to an old mail, but I'll let it slide just this once. 8)

> I fear this as well. Periodically we have people complain that there
> are too many methods of communicating with other brainzers and adding
> forums would only make this worse.

I'm probably one of those people. Wiki, mailing lists, blog, irc, even
bug tracker and edit notes - all contain information that is often only
partly available in other places but which is often needed and referred
to.

I enjoy participating in MB, and when editing something, I try to do my
best to make sure the information I enter is accurate. However, I don't
have enough time or energy to keep up with all the information channels.

> Even though I am generally against forums, here is what I think we can

I'm against them as well. They follow the logic of WWW/HTML: presenting
information works fine (as long as they actually contain some
information), but interaction is often cumbersome. Rephrasing Nikki,
their features (and usability) are far below any decent mailreader.

Mailing lists do have their weak points; barrier for novices might be
one of them, volume could be another. The former could be helped by
introducing forums, the latter by dividing the discussion into several
areas/lists/whatever.

I haven't used this list for searching help regarding some particular
artist etc. either, because I haven't seen that as part of the profile
of this mailing list. Also, the system already has a list of people that
should have more information about a particular artist - the subscribers
- so it could be handled more conveniently there than in a generic
  mailing list.

> Thoughts?

I'm bringing up the Third option, namely NNTP. There are several usable
remote clients, it has a well-defined system for cross-posting and
referencing etc.

No, I'm not idealistic enough to suggest that we'd get more contributors
into these discussions by moving them into NNTP 8)

However, there are some systems that allow interfacing forums via NNTP
or the other way around (Papercut comes to mind), that would provide
sort of best of both worlds.  That's assuming they work - I have never
tried one. :P

-- 
 Sami Sundell
 ssundell at iki.fi