So this is how it ends...and perhaps another place to go!

[jon dossey]

>It's more just that quite a few guys who've been in the computer industry
>for more than, say, 15 years, and can remember when BBS's with fidonet were
>'Da Sheeit', and basically hate the forum interface.

I remember fidonet, and I'm only 20.  i caught the very end of the bbs era.
I don't understand everyone's beef w/ forums?

>Even more importantly, a threaded mailing list is a much better way to go
>through a load of posts, and well, it's simple - it doesn't require you to
>log in, it doesn't require you to browse through a bunch of sans-serif
>text(harder to read than a serif font, scientifically proven.)

You log in once, as long as you've got cookies enabled on your browser.
What if we could setup the forum using style sheets and allow the users to
select the fonts, colors, sizes, etc?  Would it interest you more than?

>It's also not a push-pull network service, we send one message to the
listserver, and it blasts it out to a list of email address, after it makes
sure itconforms to the various rules - quoting, line length, etc.

This is where a message forum has an email list beat.  You post one message
and anyone in the world can read it ... if they WANT to.  No cluttered
inbox, no sifting through and deleteing tons of messages you don't want.

>If you want a thousand people to read the mailing list, it won't
break the server, because it's not on the server.

I don't think this list in forum format requires nearly as much bandwith or
cpu time as you seem to think.

>If a thousand people wanted to log into nissanforums, I'd be willing
to bet something would break - maybe not, it might take
2000 simultaneous users - I wonder if the forums have ever had even
500 simultaneous - right now it's at 25, and apparently running, so, so far,
so good.

That will never happen.  Are there even 2000 people on this list?  What if
we setup a forum specifically for list members?

>I'm not trying to dog the forums per se, but where's the scalability?
>Larry's list could serve 100,000 recipients, easily enough, and
>as Wayne said in a reply, it's NOT a superior interface.

Who cares if it could serve 10 trillion?  We'll never have that many users.

>Every message from this list goes into a subfolder in my inbox,
>it's a simple enough mechanism, and it scales up nicely.

Just like a message forum.

>Go ahead, try to archive the forums - I mean, at least it's php
>and not cold fusion, but their pretty similiar technologies - both
>are server side scripting languages that allow you to make database
>calls via their special tags - it takes quite a bit more cpu/ram, and
>doesn't work as well for the purposes of reading through
>a bunch of information..

Hey!  I'm a coldfusion developer and I'm vaugely offended by that ;)
Not if the forum software generates static documents.  A descent server with
some scsi drives and its hardly a concern.

>At least it's not a Micros*cough*oft technology :P

Here here! :)

I guess it boils down to simple preference.  I don't necessarily prefer a
message forum over an email list, but some of you guys make it out to be
some awful, unusuable, unworkable solution.  There are message forums
running on pentium II's with 5 times the users of this list without a single
hiccup.

I think a message forum, with some tweaking over the standard old forum,
would definatly a valid solution to our problem.
Just my $0.02, hope I didn't ruffle any feathers.

.jon
93 SE-R + N2O