[Wolves] Badly in need of a forum?

Wed May 18 01:44:00 BST 2005

--- mad-malc at tiscali.co.uk wrote:
> Hi I guess you're getting your wish the list is
> pushed to you, again and
> again and again, where as with a forum you have one
> point of reference, plus
> many forums are able to hold more than 6 months of
> back history.
> This mailing list clearly has no accessible history
> to new members.

Ok ok ok. Stop. Is your incessant posting on one topic
an example of how to flood a list with the unnecessary
repetition that you are complaining about? I had to
stop reading after the 6th mail, the other 6 seem to
say exactly the same thing.

Firstly, no. At the bottom of every email from the
list is a link to the LUG mailing list information
page. For you delictation I will provide you another
one here:

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/wolves

First link on that page is the mailing list archive
where all emails ever sent to the list are stored for
other people to read:

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wolves/

Now, you don't have to wade through all that to find
what you need. Search google for anything and if its
on our list archive it will show up in the results.
You should always search google before asking a
question as people get hacked off with laziness.

If you want to search the list archive for something
specific use the inurl: or site: function google
searches as described at:

http://www.google.co.uk/help/operators.html

Essentially, in the google search box you type:

site:http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wolves/
<search term>

and it brings you results from the specified site.

Secondly, as I said before:

"Forums make things easy to miss." How do you know
when someone has posted on the threads you are
following without checking 7 different forum threads?
Easy. You use a mailing list and it just drops on your
doorstep.

Again, repeat:

"If you are receiving too many messages, change your
mailman preferences to receive them in digest mode,
which means you get one big email every day containing
all of that days messages."

You can do that at the mailing list info page. The
link is above or at the bottom as usual.

Thirdly I can tell from your method of replying to
every post on the topic, that you are using the
mailing list as thought it were a forum. You don't
have to state your case in each mail. It works as a
conversation. Threaded mail clients make this easier.
People read the threads. If you move this to a forum,
people stop reading because it takes longer to move
between threads and work out whether there have been
any new posts. For this reason most of the regular
users of this list would not use a forum. People get a
lot of mail and 27 clicks to check whether there have
been new posts on a number of threads take too long.

As a case in point, I think we had a forum a long time
ago and nobody used it.

If you really would prefer to use a forum, set one up.
I think you'd find most of the more technical people
here won't use it because it takes too long to use.
Which means you will get less helpful answers.

> As i recently joined the mailing list to find out 
> what was going on my conclusion was that the 
> wolveslug was missing a forum, judging by the
content > and number of the daily emails, which are 
> predominantly of the problem aired problem solved 
> type rather than informative news of future events.

Thats what the list is for. Asking questions and
getting answers. We don't go rambling through the
hills or anything. Meetings are every fortnight and a
list goes around shortly before to ensure there are
some decent numbers attending.

Admittedly, you seemed to have joined in a heavy
period, it's not always like this, it's normally 15-20
emails a day, you seem to have missed the beginning of
most of the threads and some of them have veered
wildly off topic. I can understand why you might think
it's difficult to keep up. Simply, if you don't know
what it's on about, delete the mail and ignore the
rest of the thread, or try to get back up to speed by
reading the quotes that have been left in from a
previous mail.

For anyone else is listening, this is where good
etiquette comes in. Don't leave the whole email in
there and drop your comment at the top. Strip out the
unnecessary stuff and leave in enough of the mail
you're replying to so other people can make sense of
what you are commenting on. Put your comments
underneath what you are commenting on, not above and
certainly not at the top of an entire, unedited email.
Delete any added mailing list footers or email
signatures from the end. This makes the whole thing
move faster and allows people who get a lot of email
to process it quickly. The alternative is that people
stop reading your emails and you will miss out on
getting help from these people.

I know we've tried not to a big deal about this since
nearly burning Peter Cannon alive about it, but even
he will tell you now, how much difference this makes.
I think we can clear up a lot of this problem of many
mails and taking too long to read if we make some
effort to be concise in trimming, not waffling too far
off topic in a thread and general etiquette.

For the second time in one day, read:

http://www.massey.ac.nz/~tameyer/writing/quoting.html

Or even the RFC on Internet Netiquette:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt

And my favourite 2 links for anyone who cares to
learn:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

This stuff makes a difference. We should all try.

To conclude, change your mail delivery settings to
digest mode and sit on the list for a while so you can
learn the way it works, it does take a while.

As Sparkes said, this debate is as old as the first
forum and you will find that people in the position to
answer your questions don't want to have to come and
find your problems, they want your problems to come to
them in the most convenient way. You will find that
most technical people here won't use a forum as it
takes more effort and more time.

And if you *really* want a forum, help yourself and
set one up. Tell us about it and people who want one
will use it.

Ad - as close to flames as he's ever gotten ;)

-- 

http://www.drinky.org.uk

http://blog.drinky.org.uk

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