RE: We need a forum!

[Paul Smith <paullocal@...>]

> First, I can work offline.  I'm offline right now in fact.  My job lately
> has taken me to many interesting places.  I'm usually quite busy there, and
> network connectivity has been expensive, sporadic, broken, filtered, and/or
> unbelievably slow.  (Boldly exploring the limits of packet loss my OS's TCP
> implementation can tolerate.)

Really, this depends on how important Lua is to you (as people have said 
before). Personally, if I'm 'offline', I don't want to know about Lua 
stuff. Getting the mailing list messages uses up bandwidth I'd rather not 
use if possible.. I'd rather it wait until I get back to the office.

If I'm on limited bandwidth, I want to just get messages which are important.

I could "turn off" my subscription to the mailing list, but that means that 
I won't get the messages into my email client at all (the mailing list 
won't serve them to me when I turn my subscription back on), so I have part 
of the data locally, and part on the mailing list archive - so I've lost my 
email client's searchability. A forum wouldn't have that. All the data 
would always be in the same place.

> Second, I don't have to depend on the forum site being up to be able to use
> it.

Agreed, but, again, it depends on how important it is to you. If the forum 
was offline at weekends, it wouldn't bother me at all - I use weekends for 
my family.

> Third, I can skim through messages as fast as I want.

Fair enough.

> As a side effect, this also generates far fewer ad views for those sites....

(Why is that good - most sites that use ads do it as an alternative to 
charging you for usage, or ceasing to exist. Would you rather pay a fee to 
use the site, or that the site didn't exist?)

> Finally, I don't have to put up the provider's idea of what a good UI is.  I
> can (and do) switch mail clients often.  I can't fix the forum software, and
> even if I could, you probably don't like my taste in UI anyway.

Agreed again, but, to me, that's a minor issue.


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