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Mailing lists vs forumsMailing lists vs forumsPosted Mar 19, 2010 6:06 UTC (Fri) by robla (subscriber, #424)In reply to: Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be. by jwb Parent article: Luis Villa: Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.
Guilty as charged, but still....can you name a significant open source
effort that doesn't use a mailing list for team communication? Forums are great for drive-by participants, but not-so-great for core contributors.
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Mailing lists vs forums Posted Mar 19, 2010 11:54 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
It's the other way around. Web forums *especially* suck for drive-by participants (this includes, but is not limited to, phpbb and bugzilla), because they have to register just to post their single patch. And most web forums don't even allow to unsubscribe, let alone having to remember a password.
At a good mailing list, you can just say "now I'm in" and "now I'm out". There is usually no password (or you can ignore it). You don't have to remember your username after three years of inactivity (I think I now have four accounts at the gcc bugzilla).
Some webpages you can still browse with w3m somehow, others you can't because their <table> is configured in an awkward way or they rely on Javascript or some whack. With MLs, I can use the client of my choice, even text-mode if I desire so.
Mailing lists vs forums Posted Mar 19, 2010 17:59 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I think robla referred to read access: web forums are better for passersby to read because information tends to be more accessible, while mailing lists are better for threaded information but suck to follow conversations. For write access mailing lists may be better for casual visitors (many allow even posting without registration), while forums... well, they suck anyway. With good mailing list -> web converters you have the best of both worlds.
Mailing lists vs forums Posted Mar 20, 2010 7:39 UTC (Sat) by robla (subscriber, #424) [Link]
Well, actually, I was talking about write access for drive-by users as
well. While it's true that mailing lists can be configured any way, the dominant way to configure them these days is to only allow members to post, and I think the dominant mailing list manager is still Mailman, which does have a password regime very similar to forums.
So, mailing list process:
Compare that to forums:
It's all a matter of taste, but as a community manager, I got schooled on
Mailing lists vs forums Posted Mar 20, 2010 7:54 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] The answer is obviously: well, don't configure your list so only subscribers can send mail, and tend to moderation chores as soon as possible. I run a low volume mailing list this way; maybe running one with thousands of subscribers is hard to do.There is something I dislike about mailing lists which is having to decide each time if I send mail to sender, to list, to sender cc list, to sender and everyone else cc list... Each list has its own policy (which I can't find anywhere) and each subscriber has a different policy too: "Don't CC me, I'm on the list", "Please CC me as I'm not subscribed" and I can't ever remember which is which. Hey, get a good mail reader which keeps threads together and ignores duplicates!
Mailing lists vs forums Posted Mar 20, 2010 11:58 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>While it's true that mailing lists can be configured any way, the dominant way to configure them these days is to only allow members to post, and I think the dominant mailing list manager is still Mailman, which does have a password regime very similar to forums.
You are being unfair on the mailing list process. Sourceforge for example is a large platform that uses Mailman, and so even trying step 1 and 2 is like people sending "unsubscribe" messages to linux-kernel@ rather than majordomo@. To unsubscribe from Mailman, you don't need a password — that is, if you do the unsubscribe by mail rather than going through the extra hassle of the web interface.
Compare with forums:
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