Fate of the list

[Chuck Bartlett]

Jim Wright wrote:
>ROFL  Progress?

Then Chris wrote:
See, this is the type of negative energy on this list I find troubling.
Seriously, you were rolling on the floor?  I give a thoughtful response and
I get this?

Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. But Chris, you must understand,
you are a graphic designer, and there are a fair amount of engineers and
technically trained people on the list who consider GUI front-ends a
hindrance. Which they often are. Web forums are not progress. They are a way
of displaying the information that is more user-friendly to those new to the
Web. I'm a technical writer who minored in design, and every Web forum
interface I've encountered is much less usable than the series of emails
that arrive in my SE-R mailbox everyday. It's nice when the signal to noise
ratio is high, but my email client is always much faster than the Web site
hosting the forum. Bottom line is that I can read the information much
faster in the mailing list than I can in the forums.

Online forums fragment a group, but mailing lists bring the group together.
I think updating the FAQ would go a long way to solving some of the issues
with the newbies. Even the dumbest of newbies tend to read a FAQ. Many list
members have saved emails posted to the list for their personal reference.
It is those emails that need to make it into an FAQ.

I understand you're a designer, so you have that bias to making something
more visual. However, what is needed is faster and more efficient access to
the information we already have. I personally have no problem finding stuff
in the archives, but I can see how some might have problem. Some people are
just better online researchers than others.

Chuck Bartlett
'92 Classic
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