Jim Henderson escribió:
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
That was a horrible experience for sure... The forums I frequent (www.linuxquestions.org, www.fedoraforum.org, etc) have some rather nice features to them, for instance the ability to search within a thread for a particular message. Also you don't have to quote the whole thing. As with e-mail you can trim down your reply to only include what you want in the quote (though this involves using BBCode). I certainly don't understand many of the points for bashing web forums, maybe I've been on them for far too long to actually prefer them to mailing lists. In any case, I do find advantages to each approach, and I reckon the usfulness of both methods to tackle down the same problem: Human communication via non-real-time text messages. One is web based, which means it can be accessed really easily, all you need is a connection and a browser, so it does not matter what computer you use; the other requires a mail/news client, and a connection... Both seem to be fairly easy to use and both have actually pretty much the same requirements. However the main advantage of web tools I see is that you don't require to have the news client, the browser is enough, so you can visit and read your subscribed threads and what not from any computer regardless it is yours or not, where as for mailing lists/news forums, you do require the client... You can use webmail for mailing lists, but I'm not sure there is a reliable web-based news reader.
In any case the ideal tool would be one which could do both things: provide NNTP access *and* Web access, with the same level of interaction and features for both types of users. Maybe I came to web technologies when the "old ones" were already being surpassed by the boom of web-based tools (early 1990s), maybe I'm too "trendy"... Whichever, I can certainly use either, though I'd rather use web-based... maybe I never learnt how to properly use the tools, and obviously, the web was much easier.