Web forums vs mailing list (was Re: minor list changes)

[John Foust]

At 08:51 AM 3/7/2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
>I prefer the flow and linearity of a mailing list.  I like to consume
>everything and discard what I don't care for.  With a web forum, it's more
>difficult to keep track of new messages being posted.  And with the
>incredible level of topic drift here, it's not entirely evident what's
>being discussed in any particular thread based on the title.  You might
>miss something you would be interested in or be helpful with.

Ah, good - some reasonable discussion on the notion, as opposed to
just saying "poopie".  

I agree with what you say about the pleasure of accidental 
discovery.  With a mailing list with wandering topics, where 
you're "forced" to read most messages, you learn things you didn't
know.  On the other hand, I don't think that would be impossible
on a web forum.  Just have one forum and read all the postings.  

And I agree that forums have a different "feel" than mailing lists.  
Mailing lists are more "classic".  Many of us may have decades of 
experience with them, and only a few years of comparable experience 
with web forums.

But it would also be cool to have machine- and topic- specific forums.

>Find a web forum that acts like a mailing list and I'll buy in ;)

http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/ seems to be down 
temporarily, and does it only update every 24 hours?  

Has no one invented a web forum / mailing list hybrid, where web 
postings are echoed to the mailing list, and vice versa, and it 
updates in real-time or something close to it?  If some large 
percentage of subscribers switched to this web version, it would 
certainly lessen the load on the SMTP-based list.

- John