[Coco] Forums versus email was: Re: I think I hit a nerve with my CoCoList Survey on email.

[William Astle]

Frank Pittel wrote:
> I'm often amazed at how many people will not use a web forum. These days
> I think that it can be assumed that people with an internet access that
> allows email access also have web access as well as a browser.

At the expense of continuing this somewhat contentious and off-topic
thread, I decided to try to inject some calmness into the discussion.

Steve's original request was for anyone who absolutely had no way to
access the web at all. I highly doubt there is anyone on the list
currently who falls into that category.

That said, this has, predictably, degenerated into an argument about
whether web based forums or email is better. The actual answer is "it
depends".

With forums, I can easily cherry pick what topics I want to read, thus
reducing my bandwidth requirements and possibly time investment
substantially. On the other hand, I have to remember to go to the site
and look at the forum.

With email, all the messages for the discussion come to me whenever I
open my email, which I do at least daily. Leaving aside configurations
using IMAP and other fancy protocols, that means I download absolutely
everything from the discussion. On the other hand, I don't have to
remember to look at a web site on a regular basis.

Many people are screaming at me saying "how hard is it to remember to go
to a web site to keep up on something?". Obviously, it's not difficult.
I can bookmark the site and go there whenever I want. However, suppose I
want to follow several dozen or more forums? If I have to go to several
dozen web sites regularly just to poll for new messages, that takes a
fair amount of time. This is especially an issue with low volume
discussions since the time to check for new comments becomes vastly more
than the time it takes to read the messages.

Now, with an email based discussion list, I can participate in hundreds
of discussions simultaneously without having to check hundreds of
separate places for new messages. Rather, all the messages come to me in
one place and I only have to remember to check my email. Basically, my
email is serving as a gigantic aggregation service. Again, for very busy
discussions. However, most discussions are relatively low traffic, often
with no traffic for days or weeks.

So what it boils down to is this: It depends on many factors whether
email or web-based is better. And some of the most important factors
depend on the individual participant.

My personal feeling on the issue is that rather than an either/or
situation, we need the following:

A web based forum software package that gateways all posts to an email
list. But, simultaneously, all posts from the mailing list also get
gatewayed automatically to the web based forum. Obviously this would
need to ensure there were no loops. Keeping replies associated with
their original thread should be relatively straight forward since both
web forums and email software have the concept of threads. I would
expect such web forum software to have an interface that is familiar to
most web users, say like phpBB or similar to minimize confusion.
Obviously the email interface is up to the individual email user.

Now, I know someone is going to say, "But we have all that. Just use the
Yahoo group." Quite frankly, Yahoo's interface sucks, or at least it did
the last time I tried to use it. And last time I tried to sign up for
anything there, it was like having wisdom teeth extracted. And that
doesn't take into account that posts on maltedmedia do not show up there.

I'll leave with one final note. If we had such a system as I just
outlined, it would solve any problems for Steve's hypothetical user that
has email access but no web access.

-- 
William Astle