Chris's Wiki :: blog/tech/MailingListsVsForums Commentshttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/MailingListsVsForums?atomcommentsDWiki2023-05-13T10:34:32ZRecent comments in Chris's Wiki :: blog/tech/MailingListsVsForums.By elviejo79 on /blog/tech/MailingListsVsForumstag:CSpace:blog/tech/MailingListsVsForums:116e2882982106c07327b7bf8e6ef62176adb15eelviejo79https://elviejo79.github.io<div class="wikitext"><p>I agree with you that a forum is the best way to answer questions. Abd proof of that is stackoverflow.com... that long time ago was described as a forum where questions are the threads and has two levels of nesting answers and comments on the answers.</p>
<p>However on your comment you put forums and chats (discord, slack) on the same category... And they are not </p>
<p>A forum encourages asynchronous communication whereas a chat encourages synchronous.
So a chat seems nore dynamic but fragments our attention with constant interruptions.
Plus in a chat, there are threads, but the default mode is chronological order.</p>
</div>2023-05-13T10:34:32ZFrom 193.219.181.219 on /blog/tech/MailingListsVsForumstag:CSpace:blog/tech/MailingListsVsForums:0d061929e3ee174259012f720f1010b09b892c5eFrom 193.219.181.219<div class="wikitext"><p>Most of my list reading nowadays goes through the NNTP gateways of Gmane and Lore (LKML), and even though it looks more or less the same as an IMAP folder (and lacks the convenience of IMAP), I somehow feel less guilty pressing "Mark all as read" on an NNTP group than a mail folder.</p>
</div>2023-05-12T12:15:08ZBy Ian Z aka nobrowser on /blog/tech/MailingListsVsForumstag:CSpace:blog/tech/MailingListsVsForums:a4db04819305ad75304d65ca76a6e31bfeea4f14Ian Z aka nobrowser<div class="wikitext"><p>Even on forums, there is always a "General" or "Other" category, and that's where most posts will end up. So that makes filtering by category largely useless, in my experience.</p>
<p>As for filtering by thread, all forum interfaces I have seen repeat the same fatal flaw: I have to "open" or "read" a thread at least once before I can mute it. Compare that with reading a mailing list in mutt where you can just go through the thread list (hitting only one key per thread!) and mute by the subject.</p>
<p>I agree that net news was the best discussion medium ever, and as far as I know there is no technical hurdle to adopting it now. I don't know how good the news reader support in mutt / neomutt is, though, and all other readers definitely suck (slrn can't even decode QP and base64, last time I tried it).</p>
</div>2023-05-11T18:34:39ZBy Miksa on /blog/tech/MailingListsVsForumstag:CSpace:blog/tech/MailingListsVsForums:f8f4dcf6a8122f5231d9608c68bd1f8c55e4244cMiksa<div class="wikitext"><p>But it was the newsgroups that handled all of this best, and I rue it's demise regularly. You could easily start a new thread. A thread could split into subthreads with different discussions. And you could immediately see how many new messages a group had and read through all of them just by hitting space bar repeatedly. I just wish forums would build a newsgroup interfaces.</p>
<p>On a thread list on a forum it may be hard to spot new threads before they drop to the second page. If fact I mostly read a forum where most of the discussion has concentrated to thousands and tens of thousands of posts long "megathreads". I always just open them from bookmarks, it may be months before I check the forums for any new threads. And all these megathreads have multiple ongoing simultaneous discussions and you need to read all posts to keep track of them.</p>
<p>I also read a history blog with weekly new posts and great discussions in the comment section of every post. The blog is WP based and the comments have several separate threads and keeping up with new comments is arduous. When I return to the blog I last read it on May 5th. So I search the page for "May 5" and see there are 25 hits. I refresh the page, search again and now there are 38 hits, so several new comments. I need to jump to every new hit, read them and any related newer comments. When I have read all of "May 5" I then search for "May 6" and repeat until I have caught up. Newsgroups would be god send.</p>
</div>2023-05-11T16:03:36ZBy Anonymous on /blog/tech/MailingListsVsForumstag:CSpace:blog/tech/MailingListsVsForums:87c24f8c5993581947b5eee58a31b72374ee07c0Anonymous<div class="wikitext"><p>Forums ? Hasn't that gone the way of the dodo ?</p>
<p>All the cool kids use chats these days, like Discord for example.</p>
</div>2023-05-11T11:11:10ZBy Paul Tötterman on /blog/tech/MailingListsVsForumstag:CSpace:blog/tech/MailingListsVsForums:31a72e69a7bc62a7e2319e98ddbd89443014ceafPaul Töttermanhttps://paul.totterman.name<div class="wikitext"><p>There's dfeed: <a href="https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed">https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed</a></p>
</div>2023-05-11T04:46:33Z