[LAU] new! linuxmusicians.com

Rob lau at kudla.org
Mon Apr 14 01:58:17 EDT 2008


On Monday 14 April 2008 01:10, Arthur wrote:
>  Many mailing lists are not well represented on Google.

Many web forums require you to sign in just to search, with the same 
end result.  Additionally, every web forum package has its own search 
algorithms and a different interface with which to use them, and some 
are dumb enough that you wouldn't even be able to search for the 
word "JACK", for example, due to a minimum query length requirement.  
They are much less effective than either Google or my own email 
client's search feature, to say nothing of pcregrep.

> no one is suggesting that those who prefer mailing lists should 
> stop using them.

As long as there's a possibility that critical mass will shift to the 
walled gardens of web forums (as happened a year or two ago in one 
community I'm no longer a part of thanks to that shift), I'm going to 
do whatever I can to prevent it from happening.  It may not look like 
a zero-sum game, but it increasingly is one.

Web forums turn working communities into help desks cum high school 
cafeterias.  They are very well suited to posting pictures of your 
cat yawning with a caption written in script kiddie, but very poorly 
suited to actually solving problems and then having the solution 
preserved for posterity.  

Anyway, I'm sure we'll be having this conversation again in a couple 
years when people start talking about moving mailing lists and web 
forums into Second Life.  

Rob



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