Web forums (was Re: [sclug] Members Home pages.)

[Jonathan H N Chin]

Leon Ward <leon.ward at added-dimension.co.uk> wrote:
> Come on people, drag your points of view out of the closet!
> For those who don't know what a nuke is, The basic shell is nearly ready on
> http://sclug.nardware.co.uk , It will give an Idea of what PHPnuke is.
> I think a simple Yes or No from the list members will suffice.

The way I see it, unless SCLUG membership has increased dramatically
since I last was physically present at a meeting, there are nowhere
near enough people to support multiple groups (email, web, etc).

ITSM, For a web forum to be any use, it will have to be active.
This requires enough people to visit it often enough that there is
useful content: ie. people get timely replies to their posts, etc.

However,

I look at the sclug website perhaps once a year.
I read USENET daily.
I read mail a couple of times an hour.

I see Yahoo! groups with over a hundred members that are basically
dead. Why do we think a sclug group with a fraction (I guess) of
that number would fare any better?

And, come to that, if a web forum is really wanted, why not
just use (something like) Yahoo! ? Then the mail<->web stuff
happens automatically.

A quick trawl of Google hits turned up:

    http://tim.suttonfamily.co.uk/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=11

but why not just use a known working solution like Yahoo! Groups ?



I still haven't seen any description of what building this
elaborate PHP solution buys over the combination of the current
mailing list + the web archive at:

    http://www.sclug.org.uk/pipermail/sclug/


Oo, look, recursion!

    http://www.sclug.org.uk/pipermail/sclug/2003-July/000690.html


-jonathan

-- 
Jonathan H N Chin, 1 dan | deputy computer | Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK
<jc254 at newton.cam.ac.uk> | systems mangler | tel/fax: +44 1223 335986/330508

                "respondeo etsi mutabor" --Rosenstock-Huessy