[License-discuss] web forums for license-* [was Re: proposal for revising code of conduct]

[David Woolley]

Luis Villa wrote:
> I've personally never seen open source forum software that wasn't an
> abysmal nightmare from a usability perspective, whereas many people
> here have email clients that they have chosen and customized
> 
I would definitely discourage forums.  I think a lot of forums are 
created for vanity reasons, and forum services play on that because they 
are really after trackable advertising targets (the need to login means 
that, even if you don't post, and therefore allow personal targetting, 
the ad-rotator can ration repeats).  The result tends to be 
fragmentation of the discussions, as multiple, competing, forums get 
created.

Also the need to pull the postings, and that it is difficult to get them 
out of the cloud, make them a hassle for readers.

(On the other hand, it is true that relatively few people know how to 
use mailing lists these days.  There seems to be an increasing number of 
people asking on list to be unsubscribed (not here, that I've noticed), 
and, in combination with GUI user agents, with poor quoting support, 
bottom quoting of the whole of a long thread is becoming the norm.)

(Unsubribe me requests tend to come out in batches, so people seem to 
grin and bare it for a long time first.  It seems that a lot of people 
fail to realise that they subscribed to a public list, and almost accuse 
the list administrator of spamming them!)


-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.