On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 12:43:13 -0700, John Cliff wrote:
took < 3 secs here, evidently something about your connection to there that wasnt happy. Point was that a community that big would be a total mess as a mail list.
Ultimately my point as well was that NNTP != Mail List.
I find that particular type of forum to be horrible for conducting coherent discussions; there's absolutely no threading, which means if I want to follow up to reply #3 in a thread that has hundreds of replies in it, I have to cite the entire message I'm replying to. Discussions aren't flat - they're threaded and spread in a tree-like fashion.
Flat "forums" like these are great for real-time discussions, but don't work well for interaction. Forums should not try to mimic an instant messenger system, but rather should try to allow for branched discussions which allow someone to come in a month later and be able to follow a particular line of thought without having to read every message in the thread.
I picked on one thread (and on a second try, the interface loaded up faster) - the "Moon Key, Olivier Ponsonnet (3D)" thread. Most of the replies are "atta boy" type comments, but a few are not.
I was in a similar forum earlier today looking for a way to stream content from Pandora, and found a program that almost does what I need (I should be able to fake the rest of it) - there were about 300 messages in the "thread", and finding the latest version of a file was absolutely hopeless. It ended up being on page 19 of 24, and took me about 20 minutes to find it. The exchange of ideas is a complete jumble and nonsensical to anyone trying to participate after the fact, find out what the program can and cannot do, or how to get it running in an environment outside of where it was written (Windows/Firefox). Totally useless discussion area for me.
For any sort of meaningful online community interaction - particularly one where processes and concepts are being discussed, threading is an aboslute MUST.
Jim