[scribus] Using BBS instead

[jwminer at accessvt.com]

Some of the posts on this topic seem to come from a world different
from the one I'm living in.<g> I started participating in mailing
lists, forums, and newsgroups in 1993. I gave up on newsgroups after
a few years because of the very unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio.
Way too many ads, spams, and off-topic or profane messages. Maybe
things have improved.

I currently participate in several forums and they don't bear much
resemblance to what people are complaining about here. Of course,
they're not focused on celebrity gossip, shopping coupons, or the
National (American) Football League, so that might have something to
do with it. The best of all my forums is the VectorLinux user
support forum, where people are friendly, helpful, and focused on
the topics. No spam or advertising is permitted and since you have
to sign up in order to post a message, any spam that does get
through is promptly removed and the poster is kept out. Unlike the
Ubuntu forums, we don't have so much activity that it overwhelms
someone looking for a solution to a problem. The interface is easy
to use. I've never experienced a forum that wasn't, though some are
better than others.

A con against a forum might be that it's harder to save messages
than it is in an e-mail program, where you can just file them away
to a mailbox. But a pro for a forum is that the messages remain
there for a long time, maybe even "forever." With e-mail, they
vanish unless you can locate the archives and go through a very
painful search. When a forum's search engine leaves something to be
desired, you should try Google instead. Limit the search to the
forum's URL and you'll probably get much better results than you do
with the forum's search engine.

I don't understand someone's need to keep refreshing the forum. Most
of the forums in which I've participated have a "show new messages"
option. Just click on that and there they are. You can also click on
"mark all messages as read" if you don't want to see the whole list
every time.

I never bother with those notification options, RSS feeds, and such.
Someone couldn't remember to go back to the forum where he posted a
message yet kept searching the Internet for answers. What's up with
that???? We do have some responsibility to manage our own quest for
knowledge. I also highly recommend looking through ALL the messages
rather than focusing on yours and omitting anything else. If the
topic is something of interest, be it Scribus or computer hardware,
you can't tell what might be valuable to you, especially when you're
a beginner. I learned how to build computers through reading all
messages in CompuServe's PC Hardware Forum. I never asked "how do
you build a computer," but through years of reading about
motherboards, memory types, printers, monitors, video cards, and on
and on I learned what the issues are and also where to go for
practical, step-by-step instructions. I really don't like a hit and
run approach to dealing with just *your* problem, but if you do want
to hit and run, do what you want but it's your loss.

Mail list or forum, it doesn't matter to me. As long as we can keep
spammers and obnoxious posters out of a forum, that's fine. So is
keeping the mailing list "as is." What I think would be a very bad
idea would be having both. Then we'd have to check BOTH to make sure
we didn't miss something.
--Judy M.
   USA

Registered Linux User #397786
Being productive with VectorLinux 6.0 SOHO