[luau] Re: web forums

[Eric Jeschke]

| Vince Hoang wrote:
| > 
| > http://drupal.org
| > http://postnuke.com/
| > http://www.xoops.org/modules/news/
| > http://www.phpbb.com/ (see http://ruslug.rutgers.edu/)
| > http://slashcode.com/
| > http://plone.org/

Also, you might want to check out 

FUDForum
minibb.net
phorum.org
openbb.com
openacs.org

I took a look at a bunch of these for consideration of moving the BILUG
mailing list archives, which are gatewayed to a news (INN) system,
instead to a web-based discussion board.  I think I have settled on
phpBB, which is extremely popular, well-tested and widely-deployed,
very full-featured and completely open-source.

I think that if you have the right system set up you can have the same
content hosted as both a mailing list and as a bulletin board and
leave the choice of the interface up to the user (this has worked
successfully with mailing lists gatewayed to news systems for years).
You just need the capability in the BB system of having emails properly
posted as thread replies and in having every post to the BB mailed out
on the email list.

I think that as the volume of email goes up, the tendency of busy people
is to install filtering so that email gets deposited into different
folders BEFORE you even read it.  Once that happens, you are basically
halfway to a pull system, because some days you say "I'm too busy to
read the XYZ mail folder". Before you know it, you are purging unread
folders full of dated material.

| [snip]...
| Back in 2000 we were smaller and less active, however today I think we 
| may be ready for a web forum.

I agree.  I'm getting the LUAU posts in digest mode because of the
volume of the list (at least on some days).  This says to me that there
is a potential critical mass (as Warren pointed out) for a pull-type web
forum.
 
| Unfortunately, if such a thing were to happen, it would need to be a 
| complete conversion because you cannot expect people to visit both a 
| mailing list and web forum.  The community would suffer if we try to 
| maintain both.  This means that the discussion mailing list would 
| ultimately need to be discontinued.

I don't understand why this has to be so.  If there is a psychological
reason why the same content can't be interfaced as both a mailing list
and as a web forum I'd be interested to hear it!

Eric Jeschke
http://redskiesatnight.com/