[SWLUG] IRC

[Dave Cridland]

On Fri Mar 31 01:07:11 2006, Emyr Derfel wrote:
> So can someone explain:
> 1. Why are we still using a)IRC and b)an email Discussion Server as
> our chosen forms of communication?

What Chris says probably has something to do with it. The alternative 
to IRC would be Jabber chatrooms, but actually software support for 
those is not brilliant. IRC has lots of problems, both as a protocol, 
and in the way that typical client software is fairly unapproachable.


> 2. As we have a suitable website, would it not be appropriate to 
> add a
> message board (ie phpBB) to it? Advantages would include 
> searchability
> of topics, reduced cross-talk, less messy quoting, no messages lost 
> in
> the inbox, and so on...
> 
> 
Yeah... But all the advantages you quote there are the property of 
your mailstore and the interface to it. Personally, I infinitely 
prefer the searchability I get with keeping SWLUG in an IMAP store, 
and searching it with an IMAP client - I do have the advantage I can 
code in the search facilities I need.

Messy quoting is actually helped by the sender of the mail using 
modern client software to format the message using, for instance, 
flowed format plain text, instead of fixed format. (Gmail is great at 
the searchability I hear, but doesn't send format=flowed, which is 
annoying - as Gmail customers, you should request this.).

One of the nice things about a mailing list is that nobody's forced 
into a one-size fits all kind of system, and that's also the nice 
thing about Linux itself.

If anyone actually wants to know how to setup their mail with a 
little personal IMAP server, let me know and I'll post something to 
the list about it.

Dave.
-- 
           You see things; and you say "Why?"
   But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
    - George Bernard Shaw