Neil wrote: Neil, please put some blank lines before and after your text so as to visually separate it from the text of the message which you are replying to. Your way (no blank lines) makes things unnecessarily difficult for everyone else to read.
On Feb 18, 2008 7:41 PM, Per Jessen
wrote: Randall R Schulz wrote:
Yes. And your problem with that is what? Do you have a specific objection, or are you going to continue to feign incredulity?
Here's my list of objections from an article I wrote in Jan2006:
Web forums: I also absolutely loathe web-forums. Talk about enhancing to the point of failure. Or re-inventing the wheel. What was ever wrong with newsgroups and mailing-lists? The 5 top reasons why I hate web-forums:
1. They are essentially an inferior and utterly superfluous re-invention of existing internet communication means - newsgroups aka usenet.
They may be inferior in some cases, but they are webbased so they need no separate software. I can read forums at school, in a internet cafe when on holiday, no problem.This is not the case with usenet.
Usenet software is actually MORE ubiquitous than Browser software. NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol) is just a slight modification of SMTP, and news-readers are typically only a few dozen kilobytes in size, and present on machines which run without a GUI.
2. They're web-based - the interface changes just about every time you change forum. Add to that the entirely superfluous graphics and icons and what have you, and they become slow and unwieldy.
Not to mention having to reload the ENTIRE DAMNED WEB-PAGE just to see one new message. And you'll never see it if you don't go back to that thread and specifically look for it -- so if someone adds a comment to a thread that hasn't been visited in a week, chances are, nobody will read it.
The layout is a result of the admin's choices, true. But if the choices are good the result will be good. There are even phpbb's who let the user pick the css (drop down menu) and (if the css is build to the full posibilties) therefore the full layout. I do think an admin of a OpenSuSe mailing list would be competent enough to prevent superfluous graphics.
3. Following multiple separate forums can't be done on one screen.
true, but does that matter?
Of course it matters -- it HINDERS COMMUNICATION!
You can simply open 2 browser
windows and
place them neatly next to each other on 1 screen. In fact I even
Why would I want to do that?
filter my mails so different mailing lists have their own folder and are placed there automatically.
But even then, in most mail programs, you can SEE when new mail is routed into each of those folders, which makes it possible to monitor a dozen or more mailing lists with ease.
4. There is no proper threading in forums and selective quoting is at best cumbersome.
No proper threading? What kind of forum are you thinking? I do not know any forums which don't. A message is posted in a reply to a message so it's displayed directly beneath it.
They're all over the net. I can't believe that you've never seen any of these atrocities.
5. They usually require that you login. Downright silly. Don't you log in to check your mail? Most forums are readable without logging in, just sending to it is not allowed.
And *WHY* do I want to login to dozens of different web sites just to write a reply to postings?
Do you have more reasons? As always: I can still be convinced if you'd like.
those are more than sufficient. Your one argument of half-merit (software) is solved with a one-time investment of the time needed to install a news reader (that's assuming that your GUI-based mail reader doesn't already have a news-reader in it...which most do). In contrast, forums require constant overhead delays of several seconds, lots of pointless (and large) HTML page loads, even without stupid graphics and icons.
One reason for forum instead of usenet: Linux must try to access the main public. The main public does know how to work forums, the do not know how to work usenet. The usenet history would have to be stored and made available by Google search.
It already is. The whole thing is archived going back to the late 1980's. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org