[talk-au] A modest proposal fo OSM mailing list reform

Sam Couter sam at couter.id.au
Sat May 21 07:08:08 BST 2011


John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21 May 2011 13:52, Nick Hocking <nick.hocking at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Forums (IMO) are much superior to mailing lists for one simple reason....
> > If the forum software is a threaded one then it is really easy to avoid
> > reading any drivel from the trolls. You just ignore the whole thread if the
> > troll starts it or just ignore any parts of an otherwise useful thread if it
> > becomes troll infested.

> While not a forum, you do realise you can do the same thing with a
> newsgroup interface?

Any decent mail client will offer the same feature.

Forums suck hardcore. They all have different feature sets, differently
disabled UIs, they encourage terrible posting styles, and worst of all I
have to go to them (and register separately at each one, log in each
time I visit, manage yet another user profile, remember a whole new set of
user identities for those I interact with, etc) if I want to read the
content.

With mailing lists on the other hand, the content conveniently comes
direct to me, I get to choose what software has the interface I like, and
it is impossible for censors to delete stuff before I get to see it. All
that, and I still have a delete button for stuff I don't want to see.
-- 
Sam Couter         |  mailto:sam at couter.id.au
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
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