[Lincs] Worries About The Future Of The Group...

[Peter Cooper]

Dave Pearson wrote:

> The flip-side is, of course, that there are people like myself who 
> can't
> abide "message boards". While it's less of an issue for me now that 
> I've
> finally got ADSL a message board can be terribly inefficient because 
> you've
> got to be connected to the net the whole time you use them. On top of 
> this
> you can't use your own email/news composition and archiving tools to 
> engage
> with them. For some people this can mean that it's a costly and 
> annoying way
> of trying to communicate.

These are certainly complaints I would have brought up myself a year or 
two ago, but they've become so popular nowadays that I've managed to 
grin and bear it, and now find them reasonably usable to a point. 
Certainly mailing lists were popular several years ago, but I'm sensing 
people seem to be getting sick of e-mail these days. (I'm personally 
sick of IM, but I'm not gonna win that war it seems ;-))

Admittedly, forums still aren't popular in technical circles for the 
reasons you point out, but how many of our members are really technical 
sorts? Perhaps it's the barrier between these two sometimes overlapping 
types of people (the type that prefer USENET, IRC, and mailing lists, 
and the type that prefer forums, IM, and Yahoo Groups) that is the 
sticking point in getting people to communicate? Just a thought anyway.

On the topic of connecting.. are there really people here who still pay 
by the minute for connections? No offence intended, but I'd have 
imagined anyone particularly interested in Linux would use the net for 
more than the twenty or so hours a month where it becomes worthwhile to 
go unmetered (downloading patches and various bits of software takes 
that long at least)? Could be wrong though!

Pete