Re: Forums

I think that a forum is more User- and Search Engine-friendly. 

For example, I'm a mailing list n00b.  I've always just used Google Groups to monitor/contribute to topics of interest. I like the 1-email-per-day Digest format better. 
I've tried posting to this list before, and I'm not entirely sure I'm doing it right. Heck, I might even be banned after my holiday out of office reply fiasco. 

For people who prefer email, a decent forum can provide granular opt-in email updates to new topics, posts, comments, replies, etc. You could also reply to a comment and post via email to the forum, too.  Email <--> Forum is a solved problem. 

It then becomes a content migration issue. Or you build a forum app using the mailing list as the datasource. 
---- 
Benjamin Bertrand
@benxamin | ben@blendinteractive.com


On Jan 6, 2012, at 2:48 PM, Ryosuke Niwa wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Matthew Wilcox <elvendil@gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the things being assumed here is that forums would sit alongside the list.
> 
> That would never work, they can't have two separate sets of content. My point wasn't that we should have a forum as well, it was that we should have a forum instead.
> 
> And then we began discussing the merits of each approach and discovering what the members need any solution to do in order to work well.
> 
> Here are the options that have emerged from the discussion:
> 
> 1) We ditch lists and go with a forum
> 
> 2) We abandon the forum idea entirely
> 
> 3) We make or patch a forum which maintains all of the functionality of a list, for those that don't want to use the forum's interface.
> 
> 4) We adapt the HyperMail software that manages the web-viewable archives to become more forum-like.
> 
> This option seems most attractive. We should just add a forum "front end" using mailing list as the storage.
> 
> - Ryosuke
>