Re: Forums

<<
There seems a clear sentiment that what exists now is
alienating new people and isn't enjoyed by a substantial number of
existing www-style members.
>>

As well as another bulk of people who think that a "forum" system would be 
worse.

You didn't answer to my concern about usability (and I can read they are 
shared by other people in the thread) :

* I would have to connect to the forum using a browser
* I would not have push notifications
* It would be impossible to read/search a mail offline

Going to a forum takes time. I don't want to take that time just to see if 
there's anyting new. My mail client does that perfectly: all I want in one 
place.

Also, you didn't think about the servers needed to achieve the forum 
functionnality. It has to support safe login, sessions... The current system 
put the burden on the clients. If I want to search a mail, I have to do it 
using my computer (or the server who host my mailbox). If you use a forum, 
the search happens on the w3c server. That means that the server not only 
has to be able to provide perfect uptime (because you don't have a cache on 
your computer) but also has more work to do, because it needs to render HTML 
pages, because it needs to perform search... If a mailserver is slow, 
there's no problem, mails are just somewhat delayed. If a forum server is 
slow, you can't read any message conviently. The whole process is slowed 
down and can be considered inaccessible.

Additionnaly, there would be a lot of maintenance: the forum should be 
displayed correctly on all platforms, in a convenient format. That includes 
feature phones, smartphones, tablets, handeld PDAs. A mail client is the 
basic application every connected device has. And it is very optmized.

Seriously, if you don't find it convenient to use a mailing list, it's 
either because you use a bad mail client or because you misconfigurated it. 
The only thing I agree is #fail is that you can't retreive efficiently the 
url of the threaded archieve on most mail clients. A link in the mail would 
be a nice to have.

Best regards,
François



-----Message d'origine----- 
From: Matthew Wilcox
Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2012 8:33 PM
To: Boris Zbarsky
Cc: www-style@w3.org
Subject: [Bulk] Re: Forums

Also to be clear, I am merely asking if forums have been looked into
and expounding on what I see as current issues that Forums solve. I'm
not saying that Forums are a realistic solution to apply (because, for
a start, I've no idea how the W3C functions at that level).

I'm interested in what the majority preference will be, and the
discussion has already hilighted associated issues that might be fixed
in other ways :) There seems a clear sentiment that what exists now is
alienating new people and isn't enjoyed by a substantial number of
existing www-style members.

Received on Thursday, 5 January 2012 19:55:16 UTC