on 24.02.2010 at 21:10 Mateusz Loskot wrote :
My personal opinion:
Please do not migrate to Web-based forum!
Traditional form of mailing list *is* a very convenient form of discussion forum. I allows to participate in discussions in single place - my own e-mail reader. I participate in number of mailing lists and it is very important for me to be able to participate easily, from single place. Using e-mail reader, I can check new messages of all those lists, skim and filter them quickly and get focused on those I'm interested in and archive those I'm interested in. All in single place. Having limited amount of free time, as every one here I suppose, I can't even imagine how much time it would take to do the same after all mailing lists are replaced by forums. in web world that "single place" is an rss reader
Using e-mail client, checking out new messages is constant time O(c) with Web forum it is O(n) what would significantly lead to cut down number of communities I'd like to participate. Having N forums, I'd need to load N websites, input my credentials N times, perform N x M clicks to browse a thread, another bunch of clicks to read a post, another bunch of clicks to reply. i'd say that checking for new messages in a forum or in a specific thread of a forum not only constant time but also faster than downloading all unread messages from a mailing list furthermore there are subscriptions (for new messages in a forum or in a specific thread) and also features like "show all unread messages" or "show new threads" etc.
I have participated in number of Web forums and every time it was taking order of magnitude longer to reply/post than it takes with simple Thunderbird e-mail client. Single gateway for all discussions.
imho discussion and other activities are MUCH MORE convenient in a forum-like environment (for example see intel software network: http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/)
A week ago, I posted my first message to Intel forum and this interface is very unusable. The search function is unusable comparing to simplicity and accuracy of:
+word +another site:http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost
Simply, Web forums do not work well at all with high volume technical discussions. There *is* a reason and well-settled rationale why most technical communities prefer mailing lists. And, the reason is *not* because they are a legacy type of old school hackers! It's about performance and usability, but usability does not mean HTML formatting which is useless for technical forums. first, it's a matter of taste second, the fact that you have not seen well working forum does not mean that there is no such thing at all
-- Pavel