A new message board is up (fwd)

[Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters]

> I always wonder why people put "web forums" in place. I can't read
> them while being off-line (e.g. on the train) and they are damn
> slow. Newsgroups and mailing lists are the right medium for this
> kind of communication.

|Eh, they have their purpose.  They're easier to set up than a
|newsgroup, and more widely accessible (decent browsers are more widely
|distributed than decent newsreaders).
|And the membership/registration requirements are
|somewhere in between Usenet (none) and mailing lists (members only).

I'm also solidly in the pro-NNTP camp.  One of the things I have always
disliked about places like /. is the use of a web forum when an NNTP
gateway would be so obviously more appropriate (and my userID on /. is
in the low four-digit range).

In terms of the alleged advantages of web forums, I really do not see
any of the proposed ones.  Setting up a mailing list is extremely simple
if you use a majordomo or listserv.  Just send a few admin messages--you
need to read the details, but this is easier than learning Apache (let
alone a web-list server package).  Moreover, depending on what you mean
by decent, both Netscape/Mozilla and IE-Outlook let you read both
mailing lists and newsgroups (I wouldn't use those myself, but they are
certainly more than adequate for browsing... and better than most web
forums).

With Usenet, it is perfectly possible to create a moderated newsgroup
that only accepts posts from members.  That would certainly not be
appropriate for c.l.python, but in principle one has this choice.
Everyone can still read them, of course.  With a mailing list you can
either restrict posting or reading--or both or neither.

One of the worst things about web forums is that they are damn hard to
archive personally.  I have mail and news archives on my personal system
going back to 1993, with instant offline indexing, and organization into
categories that make sense to me.  What I have kept is a tiny, tiny
fraction of what groups.google.com now has... but it is the stuff that
*I* wanted to save, for whatever reason (in truth, I'm unlikely to refer
back to eight year old posts... but sometimes to the one year old ones).
And many of the mailing lists I have received over time are not archived
anywhere I know of, so my personal copies are irreplaceable.

In contrast, it is nearly impossible to save a web forum post that I
find interesting.  If it is -really- important, I can cut-and-paste,
save-as-file, try-to-organize.  But there is a lot of manual work
involved.  The maintainer of the web forum *might* provide a decent
archive... unless they go out of "business", or their server goes down,
or they have a software error, or the change their minds, or...

Yours, Lulu...