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At 18:34 01/07/2004, korpse-lua@kaydash.za.net wrote: 
Jason Murdick wrote:
> A wiki is really not what Michael was suggesting, if I may be
> so bold as to
> interpret his initial post.
>
> He is suggesting a real forum, with threads that are organized, user
> accounts, and a real search utility. Something such as phpBB
> if I am not
> mistaken.
>
> I would have to agree with him. I'm not a big fan of mailing lists,
> preferring discussion boards instead.

I find mailing lists convenient in that they are essentially passive. I
don't have to routinely check the forum, hitting F5 every 5 minutes for new
posts. It's all "automatic" with a mailing list. Besides, your mail client
is a lot more featureful than a BB could be (I'm not an avid BB user, so I
am open to correction) for instance sorting and filtering.


I like mailing lists for some things, and discussion boards for others.

Personally, for Lua, I'd prefer a discussion board, as I'd prefer not to be bombarded with messages all day every day about it, since it's not a key part of my work. Most of the messages from the Lua mailing list I tend to just send to the trash. (and now we've found a decent spam filter service, most of the messages I get are from 3 or 4 mailing lists, the Lua, SQLite and ACCU ones being the most active, so being able to cut down on those would make my life easier ;-) ). I don't want to unsubscribe, in case I do want to get involved.

Other things which are more crucial *to me* I'd prefer to have on a mailing list (for the reasons you describe).

(I realise that for some people Lua is critial to them, so, if I was in that situation, I'd probably want the messages mailed to me)

A lot of discussion boards have a "subscription" model where you can subscribe to the particular forums you want, and then all messages to that forum get mailed out to you, so you get the benefits of both ways.

The only reasonable reason not to have a modern discussion board (IMHO) is the cost & effort of setting one up.

I'd happily set up a basic phpBB (or other free, PHP/MySQL board that works with Windows Apache) installation on our web server for the group, and I'm sure other people here would do the same, so that's probably less of an issue than it could be. (If it's something like phpBB, then it'd be relatively easy to move host if necessary as long as the old host was cooperative)


Paul				VPOP3 - Internet Email Server/Gateway
support@pscs.co.uk			http://www.pscs.co.uk/