On Sat, 02 Jun 2007 17:09:53 +0100, 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. you cant sticky a post full of tutorials on a mail list, you cant go back and edit so that the first post always has the latest version of your wip.
That's what a Wiki is for. One of the things that many of these online "bulletin board" packages do is they do one thing fairly well, and add a bunch of other unrelated features to it. The result, while it works for some, looks to me like trying to use the wrong tool for the job.
For collaborative content creation (which is what a tutorial developed in this way is), a forum isn't the right tool for the job. You want something that can be modified in a flexible manner, and that's what a Wiki is designed to do.
Similarly, I see developers of Mediawiki adding "talk" or "discussion" pages to their Wikis, but wikis are free-form content development tools, and not suited to threaded discussion. There are efforts to put threaded messaging into Mediawiki, but it's simply not the right tool for the job. That's what a forum or newsgroup is used for.
It is possible to *integrate* these different technologies without sacrificing compatibility. This is rarely done, and that it is results in the fragmentation of community that I'm talking about.
I'm a firm believer in using the right tool for the job at hand instead of trying to band-aid something that's not suited for the job into something that can work. That's also precisely why, while it's possible to include images inline in mailing list posts or newsgroup postings, I post my images to a photo album and post a link in the mailing list. For one thing, I can put higher resolution images in a photo album (not that there's a restriction to posting size on many lists or groups) and I won't piss off the group because now they have a 5 MB image to download. With mailing lists (in particular), this results in a terrible waste of space and bandwidth - anyone who's participated on a list and had someone decide to send a 500 MB attachment will know the pain endured through that process.
Jim