On Jun 2, 2007, at 9:09 AM, john cliff wrote:

at the end of the day, of all the art sites I've come across, not one

of them uses a mailing list as an interface, I know every time we have

this discussion y'all bring up the POVray site, but to my eyes its

rather like how I found POVray itself, technically capable of doing

the job but not exactly user friendly or pretty.

But you miss the main point.

Although you don't happen to find the interface particularly pretty, it is far more than sufficient and has allowed an artistic community to flourish. The functionality of most forums is there, and people didn't need to make it prettier once they hit the sufficient level where artistic discussion and use hit critical mass.

Consider a website with dancing flash animation all over. Pretty when you first see it, but once you try to navigate and all your browser controls are nonfunctional and your typing and cursor are heavily lagged from 100% CPU load, functional simplicity starts to show a bit more promising. (And, yes, I've hit that problem with forums I've checked out now and then)