[scribus] Using BBS instead

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On 2/23/11, Jan Schrewe wrote:

> Maybe it's just me, but I have yet to stumble upon an engine and/or theme
> that works. Most of them feel rather clumsy to me and you need way more
> clicks to get anywhere then with a decent mail program.
>
> The other thing is that search generally sucks in form software. Again, this
> might be subjective.

The whole ML vs BBS vs forum thing is highly subjective :) For people
who are new to Internet and Web, mailing lists are often difficult to
understand. They barely understand how they managed to subscribe, let
alone how the whole thing works (I know a great MyPaint and GIMP
artist who uses forums all the time, but who asked me very beginner's
questions about MLs), and so when they get tired of the trafiic they
don't even understand how to unsubscribe. Any ML is full of "please
unsubscribe me" topics, whereas with forums all that people have to do
is just stop visiting.

I already shared an experience in #scribus, I can only repeat it. A
company I used to work for was dead against forums. Then one of the
employees who wasn't so stubborn set up a forum anyway. The forum
immediately surpassed MLs in terms of activity. After few years it has
over 8.5K topics and over 100K comments. It doesn't mean a scribus
forum would immediately become popular, but a forum is a widely
acknowledged communication channel. It does need more maintenance than
an ML, but usually it's a tradeoff: more work for more activity.

Not that I was promoting forums over anything :)

>> You absolutely don't have to do that. Every decent forum CMS has
>> thread subscriptions so that you are pinged in the mailbox if
>> something happens. Some even go as far as providing per-section and
>> per-thread RSS feeds.
>>
>
> Yes, but with RSS you get a timeline of messages and not threads.
>
> If you get updates via E-Mail, you end up with a mailing list, in which
> posting is more complicated. Or is it possible to hit just reply and the
> mail gets posted by the system to the forum?

No, it's just notification specifically for cases when people don't
want spending much time watching all the traffic and just want to be
notified when their question got a reply. It's a handy feature for
people who don't want lurking an use this or that software every once
in a while.

OTOH, I don't see what's such a big deal about keeping a particular
page open in a browser's tab and F5ing it a couple of times a day. I
don't even mention all kinds of applications that watch changes at
given web pages for you.

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org