Managing Google Groups headaches

[Travis Griggs]

On Dec 4, 2013, at 6:52 AM, Rich Kulawiec <rsk at gsp.org> wrote:

> Yes, I'm
> aware of web forums: I've used hundreds of them.  They suck.  They ALL
> suck, they just all suck differently.  I could spend the next several
> thousand lines explaining why, but instead I'll just abbreviate: they
> don't handle threading, they don't let me use my editor of choice,
> they don't let me build my own archive that I can search MY way including
> when I'm offline, they are brittle and highly vulnerable to abuse
> and security breaches, they encourage worst practices in writing
> style (including top-posting and full-quoting), they translate poorly
> to other formats, they are difficult to archive, they're even more
> difficult to migrate (whereas Unix mbox format files from 30 years ago
> are still perfectly usable today), they aren't standardized, they
> aren't easily scalable, they're overly complex, they don't support
> proper quoting, they don't support proper attribution, they can't
> be easily forwarded, they...oh, it just goes on.   My point being that
> there's a reason that the IETF and the W3C and NANOG and lots of other
> groups that could use anything they want use mailing lists: they work.

One of the best rants I’ve ever read. Full mental harmonic resonance while I read this. Hope you don’t mind, but I think I’ll be plagiarizing your comments in the future. Maybe I’ll post it on a couple of the web forums I currently have the luxury of regularly hating.