[sclug] Build it and they will come....

[Philip Hands]

On Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:13:52 +0000, <Russell at mailmonkey.biz> wrote:
> 
> I am happy to start the ball rolling as it was my idea and an idea I have wanted to put forward for a while.
> 
> The reason for it is simple, I feel that there is a lot of valuable
> information put forward on these posts which help others to understand
> and solve problems.

The mails are archived:  http://www.sclug.org.uk/pipermail/sclug/

and that is indexed by google, so I'm not entirely sure what a forum is
supposed to add to that -- adding a xapian based word search to the
mailing list archive might be cute though, although one could just add a
search box that adds site:sclug.org.uk to the search and sends it off to
google without needing to install any software.

> But what happens when you want to find the info at a later date should
> you need it? I delete all emails after reading (well most)

well, as mentioned searching with a site: should sort that out for you,
although I wouldn't know as I don't delete email unless it's spam.

I'm guessing that that's the underlying cause of people's preference for
mailing lists vs. forums (fora?) -- people that prefer mailing lists
have probably gone to the effort of setting up a decent mail reading
environment (I use notmuchmail which is able to search for mails in the
the tens of GB of mail I have and start producing results in under a
second, generally).

I'm probably being rather prejudiced in some way, but it also seems to
me that one gets a better signal to noise ratio on mailing lists.

> I find the use of forums on the internet of great help to find answers
> to questions / problems

I don't really see why the mailing list archive doesn't provide that
opportunity as well.

BTW if you do set up a forum, I'd suggest that you allow OpenID logins,
so people are not forced to set up yet another user account.  (which
reminds me, I really must work out why certifi.ca has stopped working
for me, or switch to another OpenID provider).

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND
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