Again, it's a comfort level thing.*Some* people prefer it. It's been raised a few times so I'm running with it. If it succeeds fine. If not, I haven't lost anything. I'm not married to it (though it probably will require less effort and money than does my wife :p). I don't plan to place any ads on it so it isn't as though I'm going to make any money on it. In fact, it could conceivably cost money if it gets busy. It's in a Virtuozzo container that costs me a few dollars a month. I own the license for the software and I'm not doing anything with it currently.

There are two conditions under which it goes away. First is if it's not used. Second is if I no longer have a way to host and maintain it (that would include me going away as in permanently). Either of those presupposes that no one wishes to take over the joy of it all.

I believe that I have successfully edited the title and format of the emails that come from the site so you can delete them at will.

Jim

From: owne...@sysoev.ru [mailto:owne...@sysoev.ru] On Behalf Of Merlin Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 2:06 PM To: ngi...@sysoev.ru Subject: Re: New wiki

I gotta say that Toni enumerated quite well what I was vaguely hinting at with "this is a forum".

Along these same lines, I would like to bring up a related issue to the webforum-linking-with-mailforum thing... Can we please get a prefix or suffix tag of [FORUM] or something? This way we can use our superior MUA searching/sorting/filtering features to do with them as we need.

Thanks, Merlin

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 9:37 AM, Toni Mueller <supp...@oeko.net> wrote:

Hi,

I'm sorry, but I can't let you say this unanswered:

On Thu, 12.03.2009 at 18:15:36 +0000, Jim Ohlstein <jim....@gmail.com> wrote:

a mailing list is something entirely different, imho.

send mail with an attachment

send email to one person only (ie, outside the list)

standard feature of non-broken MUAs (ie, mutt, Thunderbird, Evolution, etc).

mailing list archive, may be even downloadable

Forums typically have these additional drawbacks in my experience:

- synchronous communications - ie, it won't work if the forum server has a hiccup or is currently hacked.

- tends to mess up attachments

- stricter limits on attachment sizes

- centralized (even private messages need to go through the server)

- threading is usually sub-par with MUAs, flexible sorting and searching is usually not available

- sorting and searching taxes the server, not the client (as with MUAs)

- broken search results with about any search engines because whole threads appear on one page

- usually no downloadable archives

- tend to vanish in a whim if the admin loses interest, or if the forum package gets swapped (all links break, nobody fixes them, archives are lost forever)

- slow performance, high cost for the operator (much higher than a mailing list)

Yes, and one that causes more fraction and friction to the user base (imho).

Kind regards, --Toni++