On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 12:26 PM, Clair Wenborn <> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I am wondering if it has ever been suggested that birding-aus change its
> format and become a forum?
This question seems to come up periodically on well-established
mailing lists. I haven't read all of the existing responses on this
thread but will toss out a bunch of points that are likely to come up.
* Some people won't use forums, some people won't use email lists. Period.
* Birding NZ went through this last year and it hasn't been a good
thing. They didn't have a huge number of active posters and now they
seem to have been split. So, the list is now less useful and the
forum..well, I have no idea.
* A meaningful percentage of people on the mailing list have some kind
of meaningful technical constraint that makes the email more
convenient: download speed/size limits, old hardware, shoving stuff to
their phone, etc.
* Forums are better suited to people that don't follow a lot of lists.
They're a nightmare for people that are on many lists (such as
myself.)
* Yeah, the archives for this list are a bit hard and non-standard. It
would be great to have a better search interface. Personally, I run
all of my list emails into a Gmail account so that I then (over time)
have my own searchable archive using Google-type queries.
* Yes, a forum interface offers more features. Yes, this is well worth
it to some. For others, it won't be worth it for one or more reasons:
don't care, don't have the technical confidence to get used to the new
features, don't have the time, etc. When you're replacing an existing
system or user interface, the new version not only has to be better,
it has to be *better enough*. There's a cost to relearning.
I'm all for a forum as long as I never have to use it and can get
emails like I always have ;-)
Ways to improve this list:
* Push the archives into something Google indexes.
* Kill digest mode.
* Change the default reply to away from 'original poster' and to 'list
as a whole'.
* Convince participants to send responses to RFIs to the list! I see
all of these great questions in the archives but hardly any answers.
This, I figure, is because the path of least resistance is to _not_
share the information with the group. A better archive search isn't
worth much unless the information is actually there...
For anyone out there that is having trouble managing the amount of
emails they get from this list (or any other), do yourself a favor and
get a Gmail account. You get a nice search facility, you don't clog
your regular mailbox with list mail, you can check the mails from
anywhere you have an Internet connection, and it's free. (I'd guess
there are other services as good or better than Gmail in these
respects, it's just the one I started using for lists some years ago.)
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