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

[Peter Serwe]

> 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?

> >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.

No, not at all like a message forum, on the forum, everything's
divided into topics, kinda limiting, to switch topics in my inbox,
I just keep going down the list, and pick a different subject.  To
switch topics on the forums, I have to go clicking around, I prefer
go through all my messages with the keyboard commands, as I'm
a die hard keyboard guy - I can run windows just fine w/o a mouse,
and any OS I care about, doesn't use one, unless you REALLY want to.

Building X11 properly with whatever window manager(s) you want isn't a trivial
task.
:D

This is of course, an opinionated statement, as mine usually are, of course,
but it's not simple preference, it's inherently simpler and faster to read
through email, and I don't mind the noise to signal ratio, I find it to be
significantly higher on the forums - where I can't get to everything nearly as
fast.

> 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.

This may, in fact, be true, but nonetheless, it's considerably more resource
intensive than a simple list server using smtp and maybe some simple
parsing mechanism, period.  I don't know how complicated the forum
application is, and I know quite a few ways to speed it up, I understand
the use of semi-static content, aka, event-driven static file regeneration, it's

still loads more complicated.

> 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.

Fonts, style sheets, customizable interface, gack - why do I have to bother
- if you could make the forums deliverable as a simple email list, IN TEXT,
I'd love it.  No smiley faces, vb code, or html, though, please.

I just don't want to have to read anything through the web interface -  as
much as I might appreciate the time, resources, and development that goes into
it.

This list, with FAR less work, and bandwidth more
efficiently deals with the whole thing, IM(not terribly)HO.

--
Peter Serwe <peter@easytree.net>
You can take my keyboard away when you pry my cold, dead, fingers off it.
Cheaper, Faster, Better, pick any two.
finger peter@easytree.net for public pgp key