Do you prefer mailing lists or web based forums?

[Christopher Browne]

On 2/3/06, Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Daniel Armstrong wrote:
> >Opinion here seems to heavily favour mailing lists over web-based forums.
> >Why is that?
> >
> 1) Web forums are active, you have to make an effort to get to them; you
> have to keep coming back as you have no idea when new comments are left.
> Mail is passive, the new stuff is delivered to you at the time it's created.
>
> 2) Through settings on your reader, mail can be downloaded and then read
> when you're offline. Web forums generally require connections.
>
> 3) You can easily choose to archive interesting threads (or the whole
> traffic). Archiving web forums isn't quite so easy. (OTOH, it's usually
> easier to see and search old archives -- especially those that predate
> your subscription -- on a web forum.)

These all fall into one categorization in "The Unix Philosophy,"
namely "Avoid captive user interfaces."

Web fora are excellent examples of captive user interfaces, as they
generally force users into accessing data in ONE way, and not "any way
the user likes."

RSS feeds can change that, to a degree; that is a way of making the
read-side of the UI less "captivated."

But with mail or NNTP, there is nothing captive about it at all.

- I can use whatever tools I have for managing email to manage the
flow of messages

- I can use *any* mail/news reader to access messages; I'm not
restricted to web browsers.

- Asynchronous processing.  I don't need to use a direct synchronous
connection to the web application in order to read/write messages.
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