Forums vs. Listserves
Kelly Irvin (Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:12:44 PST)

In my vision, the ideal forum would act like a listserv ;) That may
sound tongue and cheek, but I'm quite serious. I used a forum by
Discusware, which tried to do both, but alas, very recently, it quit
working on the servers I use due to new folder permissions rules. It
allowed reply by e-mail, but you still had to be subscribed to every
forum. It also took into account math and science symbols. Still the
forum was very proprietary, and you had to keep "subscribing" for
upgrades and tech support. I've moved on over to phpBB which is free and
can be very robust with free modifications, but I'm not aware of an
ability to reply by e-mail (I'll have to check into that for myself).

The great advantage to a forum would be an ability to isolate your
interest. Instead of having to weed through subject headings from all
over the board, you could pare it down to the "I'm most interested in"
topics. Another great advantage would be searching features. The
listserv setup seems a bit disjointed in that respect. Finally, instead
of having to send people to the wiki for image identification or other
quick response type requests using images, it can be attached with the
message.

So far, I've not seen a great combination of the advantages of both
forms of communication. In my mind, an ideal would be a forum setup for
which its members could choose to participate solely by e-mail. In the
end, though, you would be having to maintain your forum as much as you
have to maintain the WIKI, and that could be overwhelming. A lot less
admin hassles with listserv I would suppose.

Hi, Udai. Hope you, Satyam, and families are well.

Mr. Kelly M. Irvin
10850 Hodge Ln
Gravette, AR 72736
USA
479-787-9958
USDA Cold Hardiness Zone 6a/b

mailto:kelly@irvincentral.com
http://www.irvincentral.com/

Robt R Pries wrote: