On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 4:14 PM, vinny <vinny@xs4all.nl> wrote:
On 2017-04-05 15:11, Vincent Veyron wrote:
On Tue, 04 Apr 2017 12:01:24 +0200 vinny <vinny@xs4all.nl> wrote:
Every time I tell someone about the mailinglists I then have to explain how they can subscribe, how to create folders, filters etc. And more often than not they just say forget it and go to some forum.
On forums, all you see is the header for the discussion, and the number of messages attached to it.
It makes it much more difficult to follow discussions, because you don't know if there are new messages or not, unless you memorized how many were there the last time you looked at it. And even then, you can't tell whether you even read them previously or not, which a mailing list will tell you, because the messages are marked.
It depends entirely on which forum software you use. If keeping track of read messages is a requirement then you would obviously use a forum that does that for you.
But again, I'm not saying the mailinglist should be replaced by a forum. What I'm saying is that many users find forums a lot easier to use and give the choice, they will opt for the forum. Hence it makes sense to provide something for those users, if there is the manpower to do so.
This has been tried a number of times. I'ts been a couple of years since I last saw one, but multiple people have set up forums, either mirrored or not. They have all died because of either lack of usage or because the person who did it disappeared.
Not saying it can't be tried again, but in the previous attempts it certainly hasn't been "many users". It could be that whomever set them up did a bad job of course, I can't judge that as I didn't personally use them more than take a look every now and then.