Hi all,
(if you're bored of this discussion and want to get on with the birding
info, please skip this long-winded email)
I've avoided being too involved in this conversation beyond my original
statement in support of keeping things the way they are, but now I feel I
should at least justify my position. Forums are nothing new. For those who
remember the old BBS systems, the precursor to the forum system under
discussion, they are as old as email. So to say that to switch to a forum
would somehow be more modern and progressive than an email mailing list is
wrong. They are two different technologies, and they serve two different
purposes. A forum is a great way to have causal interaction among
like-minded people, similar to a mailing list, but it is a static entity,
with separate boards (categories) for major topic differences, and then
within each board the potential for several tiers of folders before you
reach actual message content. Yes I can see potential benefits to having
RFIs that have already been answered at peoples' fingertips, and yes I can
also see a benefit to not having to wade through every message to find the
ones you are interested. However, while admins have the power to change the
forum structure, users do not, and they can be a lot more hassle for an
admin to run than a mailing list.
If the admins set the forums up in a way that doesn't work, or doesn't work
for you, then you are out of luck. They are highly susceptible to hacking
and exploits, particularly the free ones like phpBB, which can quickly
become a nightmare for those in charge as they have to manually remove
thousands of posts added by a "bot" or malicious piece of code. A marketing
friend of mine told me a while ago that in general (based on her research)
about 5% of people that use a service are regular users of the forum for
that service. That low level of uptake to me demonstrates that there is
nothing special about the format, indeed I believe the main reason for this
has already been brought up in this discussion - people have to check the
forum to look for new content. Yes you can set up to get responses to posts
you have made sent to you by email, but you have to actually decide to log
on to a forum to look for new content, and that automatically makes you less
likely to use the system than an email that comes to your inbox.
The recent attempt to switch to a forum in NZ shows exactly what I believe
would happen if we tried the same for birding-aus - the community would
fragment and we would likely all be somewhat poorer for it, at least in an
information availability sense.
The positives and negatives of mailing lists have already been discussed in
detail by others, but for my mind, the flexibility and immediacy of the
current list service is its great strength. I am more than willing to
direct all incoming email from b-aus into its own folder using a filter and
then choose to read emails or not based on how busy I am and the subject
line - no different to reading forum posts except I have all the latest
content laid out in front of me in chronological order, something I'm not
sure is possible in a forum. So yes, I am all in favour of maintaining the
list in its current form. For those who are not happy with the way archives
are sorted and searched, perhaps you would be willing to offer your services
to Andrew Taylor and to Russel to help clean, sort, archive and index the
hundreds of thousands of posts into a more usable format? They do a
time-consuming and no doubt at times thankless job maintaining birding-aus
and its archives and while I'm not suggesting anyone here is attacking them
or their efforts, perhaps you can all stop and think about the potential
impacts that switching technology would have on those wonderful people who
volunteer to keep things running.
And Luke, to answer your original question about how technologically minded
people nay-saying the idea of a forum are, I have an honours degree in
information technology and my thesis was in part on information organisation
and user behavior, so I apologise for my offhand dismissal of the idea to
begin with, I just felt an in depth response to the subject wasn't required
on what is, basically, a birding mailing list and not a technological one.
Regards,
Chris
On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 9:51 PM, Andrew Stafford <>wrote:
> Thanks to Luke Shelley for his excellent arguments in favour of changing
> the
> way we view and use birding-aus. He may currently be in the minority to
> have
> expressed his views, but he is not the only one who feels the way he does,
> only the most eloquent.
>
> I have been in touch with birding-aus for a decade, and for maybe more than
> half that time now I've just browsed the archives, to check updates and
> click on anything I find interesting. Subscribing to the list fairly
> quickly
> became untenable. It might be OK for people who don't already get a lot of
> email, but for me and I'm sure many others no longer on the list it was a
> lot of stuff I didn't need or want directly into my inbox.
>
> Yes, birding-aus still serves its purpose passably well, but that's not say
> that it could not be done a lot better with an update that brings it into
> the 21st century. Just the look of it (sorry Russell) is horribly out of
> date.
>
> I use at least one other web forum/discussion group. It's perfectly easy to
> use and to contribute to. Threads get started (and wander off track, just
> as
> currently happens) but it wouldn't be hard to group topics into, for
> example, new sightings (with "stickies" for important news, major rarities,
> whatever); trip reports; equipment; general discussion. There would be a
> search function just as we can search the archives now. A change such as
> this shouldn't be anywhere near as threatening as some are making out. I
> suspect they would quickly come to prefer it and wonder why they were so
> attached to a system so ancient.
>
> It is good this thread has provoked plenty of discussion. I hope notes are
> being taken and pros and cons being seriously weighed up.
>
> Andrew Stafford
>
>
> ===============================
> www.birding-aus.org
> birding-aus.blogspot.com
>
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
> send the message:
> unsubscribe
> (in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
> to:
> ===============================
>
===============================
www.birding-aus.org
birding-aus.blogspot.com
To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to:
===============================
|
