[Asterisk-Users] Re: Google newsgroup or Forum setup.

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

> I am surprised to the opposition to forums. Are we living in the stone
> age? I have used many forums and find them 100 times easier than mailing
> lists. Imagine having to get emails from 10's of forums filling up my
> mailboxes every day.

Web forums suck ass, that is why.  They're much slower than mailing lists, 
you have _no_ archival capability and you have to constantly log on to see 
new messages (or get an email and have to click, which is pretty bad in its 
own right).  

That's not mentioning banner ads, horrific colour schemes and themes, downed 
webservers, crap MySQL barfing, smileys, avatars, and dumb-ass polls.

And that's STILL not mentioning that nauseating language, BBScript.

> 1) A forum organizes and centralizes the messages where they can be
> accessed from anywhere at anytime. You just need a browser. As far as
> seraching options the sky is the limit. Someones was suggesting how I
> should be using a "quality" product like Outlook. I don't know if he was
> joking. Although maybe "quality", I would not want my email to be on one
> desktop. We are in the age of distributed computing and not necessarily
> working for big corporations. And anyway, Outlook is virus prone. (I love
> FUD)

First, centralize != available anytime.

I pull everything into kmail and have far better searching than any web 
forum to date.  Everything is local to my system so I can browse when not 
on the 'net.  THAT is available any time.  And if you prefer your email not 
on your system, there's IMAP.  And if you do, there's disconnected IMAP.

Seriously though Outlook, OE, Eudora, Mozilla... they all allow filters -- 
why is it that Asterisk is clogging up your inbox?  Hell even kmail has a 
"rightclick/create filter/filter on mailing list..." Are you saying your 
mail client does not?  And you're complaining that mailing lists are 
archaic?

> 2) Everyone has internet access. I don't get the dialup issue. Accessing
> forums is still faster even with dialup. And the graphics are just
> options.

Untrue.  You can't turn off the colouring, tables and BBScript.  a mail 
reader is going to be far faster, especially if it is text-based.

> 3) You can still have the forum email you all your topics if you like
> email. Knock yourself out.

Actually no you can't.  You don't get threads, you don't get offline storage 
and the forum searches are all horrible.

> 4) You can have the forum email only topics of interest.

Filters.  Learn to use them.

> 5) You can have the forum email you only replies to your topic

You can set your Reply-To to go to you instead of the list.

> 6) Spammers? Forums require loggins with email authentication to prevent
> spamming. My email is full of spammers already. Do I have to deal with
> self mailing list excess?

SpamAssassin gets rid of almost all my spam.  I've not had an issue with 
Asterisk spamming me.

> Come on. This reminds me of flames arguing over whether Notepad is easier
> to use than an IDE when programming. Let me not start. I face this issue
> everyday with people who dont even wanna use computers for telephony. The
> usual answer is: "Its always been done like that." even if it saves them
> a zillion dollars and time. So I try to sell them harder.

Well I certainly find using vi or vim better than Notepad or even 
CodeWright...

> Either way, I just wanted to make my views known. Thanks for listening.

Everyone has opinions.  There's no stopping that and there's absolutely 
nothing wrong with it.  But I believe that almost any technical person 
prefers mailing lists or newsgroups to forums.  Forums bring some good 
things to the table but the remove so many more that it's just no contest.

Regards,
Andrew