[TYPO3] Mailing list or forum?

[Peter Guhl]

H. Hahn schrieb:
> Whether or not off-topic:

Who cares ;-)

> When I started to use these lists (Dutch, German and English) some twon
> months ago or so, I, too, made the error of using the reply button to
> write a new message. After all, this is a good method in normal
> e-mailing is you already got another e-mail from the destinee.
> Apart from this, several recent discussions in this English list (and
> not only there) indicate that I am not the only one who made this error,
> and that there are other confusing things about this mailing system.

True. General use is extremely different from the use techies made when
they originally designed e-mail.

> I am absolutely convinced that real forum systems (like e.g.
> Mozillaforum, and others) are much more self-explaning.

True. They use much, much more ressources but that is something people
don't care about anymore. Since they are a much bigger structure in
general they allow to put much more information and effort into the UI.

> You don't get an avalanche of messages in your e-mail reader that are
> not interesting for the moment. And when they become interesting at a
> later stage, they are pretty simple to find.

This can easily achieved by a well designed mail filter and archiving
syste. But that's something which can't be easily done by the type of
interfaces users want to see today. It's something which works the way
techies think - and they think differently from the rest of the world.

> After all, news groups are popular within inly a limited group of
> internet users. 

The techies.

> Many serious web developers do not use news groups and
> consequently have no experience with them.

They are not Techies. But, neverthless, good designers and capable to do
good work as long as the tools are built for their brain structure.

> Forums are much more
> convenient to use. 

It's hardly necessary to learn anything - you can simply start using
them. And, yes, of course that's an advantage.

> self-explaining than these prehiostoric news mailing lists.

For you.

> So I, and many other people as well, would greatly applaud a change from
> these mailing lists to a real forum system.

I can understand that. But I am rather sure we would need:
- Newsgroup
- Forum
- Mailing list

Since only all those 3 things, connected to each other, would be able to
serve any user's needs.

Now, it's a question of time, money, manpower and webserver-ressources.

BTW: The eGroupWare-Project ist trying to link it's mailing list
together with a forum. That works not bad but it has a major drawback -
since the forum isn't sending from a defined e-mail-address the list had
to be made open for everyone. This leads to a massive amount of spam at
all sides :-( But that's a problem which could be solved - if there were
some ressources to solve it. AFAIK phpBB already contains some very
early states of useful features in that area.

Regards
    Peter