- From: L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org>
- Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 22:23:27 -0800
- To: "Robert O'Callahan" <robert@ocallahan.org>
- Cc: Matthew Wilcox <elvendil@gmail.com>, "Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu" <kennyluck@csail.mit.edu>, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>, WWW Style <www-style@w3.org>
On Friday 2012-01-06 15:17 +1300, Robert O'Callahan wrote: > Yes, this can be a pain and it could be made a lot better. For one thing, > (shameless plug) BrowserID could be used to make joining a mailing list > one-click. Better still, when providing an interface for archived email > that sucks less, the interface could include an inline posting facility > that lets people send messages directly without having to join the list. > You could make it look almost exactly like a forum. Except without > destroying the productivity of the people who work here. One thing I worry about is that some types of forum user interfaces encourage people (perhaps by analogy to other interfaces they've used) to write very short messages without much content, often on the assumption that they'll explain all the things they leave out when people ask about them, in a long dialog of messages between two people. This sort of dialog wastes the time of other readers who want to follow along, and isn't appropriate for large mailing lists. This is a danger of having gateways between different interfaces to the same system, and could end up leading to clogged mailboxes and destroyed productivity. -David -- 𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂 𝄢 Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂
Received on Friday, 6 January 2012 06:24:35 UTC