[H-GEN] software runs the world
Jason Parker-Burlingham
jasonp at panix.com
Sat Mar 19 15:24:31 EST 2005
On Sat, Mar 19, 2005 at 04:05:31PM +1000, Greg Black wrote:
> On 2005-03-18, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 09:12:26PM -0500, Robert Brockway wrote:
> >> On Fri, 19 Mar 2005, Russell Stuart wrote:
> One of the problems with mailing lists is shown by this very
> thread which has now appeared on three different Humbug lists.
> That shows that (1) we have too many lists; or (2) that nobody
> knows what the lists are intended for. Since there's no
> consensus about where this belongs, I'm going to leave it on the
> list where the previous item in the thread appeared.
I wish I could lay my hands on the original discussion regarding whether
or not to split the -chat list from the original HUMBUG list. Mostly
I'd like to remember which side of the debate I was on. As I recall,
the primary force pushing for change was to cut down on the amount of
off-topic chatter.
> I have commented previously on one of the Humbug lists that I
> don't think it's kosher to respond to a list message with an
> item in a blog -- if the discussion began as a discussion on a
> list, that's really where it belongs.
Indeed. When I post to this list I try to objectively assess whether
what I'm about to send will increase the value of the archived
discussion, or not. (Some of the posts I'm most proud of have been
long(ish) tutorials or instruction in some matter or other.)
Taking a discussion to private email, a blog, IRC or even a web forum
can be justified when there's no longer any value for the original
participants. That's kind of rare, though, and the judgement call
required is especially difficult when you have to judge if your comments
could cause future interesting discussion.
> All web
> forums suck for two reasons: the software sucks completely and
> makes them really painful to use; and the people who are willing
> to use this crap are so stupid that there's no content anyway.
Indeed. I doubt I would put it so strongly these days (I'm mellowing
somewhat) and while I might occasionally manage to google up an answer
from `experts exchange' or some similar forum, their utility is severely
hampered by the fact that they rank so highly in search results, often
masking better answers.
If the Mail Archive had a better search interface I could see myself
using it exclusively. Deja News and Google Groups used to be excellent
for many types of technical questions, but they're not web forums at
all.
I think part of the problem is that so much work is put into merely
creating a web forum that it's hard to find any more tuits to go into
areas like ease of use, archiving, and refining the content. A number
of technical wikis are very successful, however; I think the NTP
software has one.
jason
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