[Coco] A New CoCo Forum, just what we need?

[Mark McDougall]

Another $0.02...

Firstly, full disclosure: the Coco is only part of my broad range of 
interests across retro computing/gaming, albeit a sentimental favourite 
since I had one back in the day. I also spend more time developing for 
the Coco than any other platform.

I joined the FB groups because I found myself on FB (mainly on my phone) 
and it was "just there". It's great for catching community 
news/announcements, photos of members' set-ups and videos form Simon. I 
also occasionally post updates to my porting projects - mainly because I 
can easily upload a video.

However, I'm fully aware that I'll inevitably _miss_ posts; my FB feed 
is so busy it's impossible to see everything. It's also very difficult 
to search reliably, and laborious to scroll back too far. So for me, 
it's useless as an archive of information, and I treat it accordingly - 
not unlike a daily newspaper that gets tossed in the bin at the end of 
the day.

The mailing list is my personal preference; easily searched, archived on 
my machine(s), doesn't require a lot of disk space. I like the fact that 
it's _pushed_ at me; I don't have to remember to visit the web page, 
remember my login, manually search through a half-dozen topics. It's all 
there, nicely summarised by topic at a glance, when I open my mail 
client. Easy to see what interests me, and what doesn't.

Of course, it has its down-fall as well, namely no pictures or videos. 
So it can be a little dry at times. And with a fractured (across 
mediums) community, there tends to be less information "worthy" of 
archiving these days. :(

As for forums; they can be great sources of valuable information. When 
Googling for an answer to a technical question, half the time the answer 
is in a forum. They're great for that...

But I don't like the fact that I have to _remember_ they exist, and log 
in and search for new posts that may be of interest in a handful of 
sub-forums. I never get my (community) news, for example, from forums. I 
tend to frequent a particular forum for a few weeks when they pique my 
interest, then they invariably fall outside my attention span.

And it doesn't stop there. Podcasts, YouTube, Google+... we truly live 
in the age of information overload.

So in summary, personally, I won't likely frequent a new forum. Of 
course I'd never discourage anyone else from attempting to establish 
one, or frequent one themselves. And it's more than likely that in the 
future I'll be searching for an answer and it'll pop up on the forum!

Good luck with it Stevie!

Regards,

-- 
Mark McDougall
<http://retroports.blogspot.com.au>