Re: Unofficial Debian User Forums

[Peter Nuttall <p.s.nuttall@dur.ac.uk>]

On Thursday 20 Jan 2005 20:45, Jan Jansen wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Debian & forums ?
>
> Is there any intention to put on the official Debian website
> (www.debian.org) a direct link towards the - for the moment -
> Unofficial Debian User Forums (http://forums.debian.net/index.php) ?
>
> By the way, I am a 'happy' Debian user, but the lack of (link to) a
> forum on the official Debian site, is a so-called 'missing chance'. I
> refer towards the good and often used forums on the Gentoo and Ubuntu
> sites ( http://forums.gentoo.org/ , http://www.ubuntuforums.org/ ), an
> easy way to find back information, an easy way to communicate with
> other linux users, etc.
>
> >From my point of view, ... a real opportunity for www.debian.org !
>
> Greetz, Jan

In general, lots of people in debian prefer mailing lists over forums for 
the following reasons:

1) A mailing list separates content from interface but a forum doesn't. The 
advantage in this is that I can use my favourite email client and you can 
use your favourite mail client and we can read the same list. A forum has 
the same interface for all users.

2) forums are harder to search than mailing lists. 

3) most forums have problems threading, (some don't, see slashdot)

4) if we had both forums and Mailing lists it would spilt the body of people 
in half. 

5) whats wrong with mailing lists?

Pete