Re: Time to get up to date?

[Graydon <oak@uniserve.com>]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 04:19:47PM +0000, john hunt scripsit:
> There seems to be a lack of a web based forum and the only sensible one I
> can find is the Bristol University Dinobase, but that does not appear to
> have anything like the quality of contributors nor the flexibility of other
> web forums I use that allow such mind-blowing stuff as attachments of
> documents (no more "can I have the paper?") and pictures.

There's a web-based archive.

Attachments = spam.  You can either pay full time staff to try to stem
the tide (they will fail; they may fail fairly slowly, but they will
fail), or you can disallow attachments.  For something maintained by
volunteers, disallowing attachments is the prudent course.

I can't imagine why the moderators would want to even consider taking on
a higher maintenance and hosting load to facilitate spam, which is what
changing to a volunteer supported web-forum would amount to.

Mailing lists are a mature technology; you can feed them into
aggregation tools or filters and get everything in a nice threaded
structure.  You can also use capable email tools for handling your
replies, which includes using whatever your preferred editor might be,
rather than going through yet another variation on a web-based rich text
editor.

Email is also thoroughly asynchronous; you only need to communicate with
a server to fetch and to send.  This is more robust across variable
connections than a web interface where you have to maintain the
connection throughout reading and any replies you may choose to compose.

So I think this list is an excellent example of the right tool for the
job, myself.  Perhaps I am old-fashioned.

-- Graydon