14 Apr
2008
14 Apr
'08
3:59 a.m.
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