Paul Johnson wrote, On 2006-09-25 07:09:
On Sunday 24 September 2006 14:16, Steve Lamb wrote:Dave Sherohman wrote:So, what are the advantages of changing to a web forum which are so compelling that not wanting to give up the advantages of mail looks like fear of change?None as far as I can tell. They're not properly threaded, there's no way to easily and effectively killfile people or subjects, there is no filtering Webforums are to communications as email/newsgroups/BBSes were in the mid-80s. Why anyone would want to go back 20 years is beyond me.Even BBS's had offline QWK packet readers for offline message reading...those often had more features than the BBS's internal message reader, and got all the phone line tie ups out of the way in advance...
...and the Bluewave off-line reader and points...For a while BBS's drove demand for greater modem compatibility and performance, and greater file compression performance.
It was even BBS to BBS mail transfer problems I had traceable to network echo cancellers not compliant with ITU-T Recommendation G.165 that inspired my telephone company to upgrade their network echo cancellers.
Back on topic, a web forum can be good if it is easy to find relevant information (and gets indexed by Google et al) e.g. the broadband site www.whirlpool.net.au which does have very active moderation.
Given proper archiving (that is indexed by search engines), a collection of mailing lists / newsgroups can enable rapid searching for relevant information and a manageable way to keep up with new postings.
Arthur.