(Re-sending a day or so later, having belatedly realized that the
bedamned Reply-To header has tripped me up once again... sorry, David,
for the multiple copies.)
David McMillan wrote:
StudioPC wrote:
But you have given me an idea. Keenspace and Keenspot use a pretty
decent Message board software and I've seen it used elsewhere.
Can't remember the name offhand, though.
Why not reincarnate the FFML as a web forum? conceptart.org is a
giant message board with sections and subsections. The ML can be
used for news or updates or the like by the admins.
Ick. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I *really* don't like most
webforum setups.
No, you're not alone - I feel much the same way, for all of the reasons
you describe and possibly a few more (some of which others have
mentioned in the interim). If the FFML were converted to a Web forum, I
would probably wind up not reading it - not out of any kind of boycott,
but simply out of the greatly increased inconvenience.
<snip>
Now, I have seen some webforum setups that were siamese-twinned with
a mailing list -- ML msgs were posted to the webforum, and vice
versa. The setup even included a single-topic NNTP server so that the
whole shebang worked simultaneously as a WF, ML, and Newsgroup. That
would make me perfectly happy, but I don't believe it's at all a
mainstream solution.
It's not ideal for me, either - because, primarily, of one major culture
difference between Web forums and mailing lists/Usenet: quoting
practices. I've rarely seen a Web forum where quoting previous messages
was standard; I've rarely seen one where it could be done in the same
multi-leveled way as it can in plain-text E-mail; more to the point,
what constitutes "proper quoting" in a Web forum (where the previous
message can almsot certainly be read just by scrolling up, and may even
still be on screen) is not the same as what constitutes "proper quoting"
in a mail/news context (where the previous message is no longer visible
unless you happen to have a separate window open for it).