[Wolves] Badly in need of a forum?

[Steve Parkes]

Deusiah wrote:

>With a forum it gives you the choice to subscribe to a topic you are
>interested in and you will get an email telling you when someone has
>replied. It won't force every single topic discussed on you.
>  
>
but the messages tell you a new message has been posted to the forum, 
here's the link to it and here's the link to unsubscribe.  I have told 
various people involved in the development of said forum software that 
this is 100% bollocks and the message set should be the contents of the 
new message with a link to reply and a link to unsubscribe.  If they 
want to continue to write software with usability problems that's their 
choice but don't expect people who know better to waste their time on it.

>If someone was to put up a forum (preferably one that works with the
>mailing list) I know I'd use it. It's not about which method is better
>as that only comes down to choice, it's about having that choice.
>  
>
this has also been discussed previously.  Mail->forum gateways exist 
with problems at the moment the two major usability problems I have seen 
with these so far (including probably the biggest that links the 
pre-existing ubuntu-users list with the unoffical ubuntuforum) are

1) people on the forums don't know that they are just a gateway to a 
mailing list and commit faux par that get they slagged off, get links to 
justfuckinggoogleit.com, get rtfm, stfw answers and then get ratty 
because the 'forum' wasn't what they expected.

2) the forum fucks up threading on the mailing list, doesn't require 
subscribed emails to post, breaks the post to sender function of email 
clients which is a fundamental part of email communication.  You should 
be happy this is list has reply to list as default we could be all old 
school and have reply to sender as default then people would really moan ;-)

the two systems are too different and every attempt to bring them 
together has failed.  It looks like a interesting problem but everyone 
who has tackled it so far got so far as to get most of the techicalities 
sorted then the different social structures forced them to abandon the 
project as a bad lot.  If it scratched my itch I would have a play but 
so far everyone in the lug who has had a play abandoned it because it 
doesn't scratch their itch either.  If you want to play at doing 
something like this I can set up a mailman list for you to do testing with.

sparkes