[gpodder-devel] On the status of the gPodder project
- From: sebastian at realpath.org (Sebastian Krause)
- Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:38:28 +0100
"Thomas Perl" <thp at gpodder.org> wrote:
> Also, what do you think of adding a forum in addition to having the
> development mailing list. Do you think a forum would help users that
> are not familiar with mailing lists? I'm happy to read your opinion!
It certainly depends. If you plan implementing something like phpBB,
my answer is simple: Please don't do it, for the sake of all of us
and the web.
The reason why I hate most of the web forums with a passion is that
they are a usability disaster since they just removed all of the
good concepts we have in mailing lists and Usenet. The most
important of these is *threading* which most of the web forum
software simply doesn't has. In mailing lists and Usenet we have
good old Message-ID and Refenrences headers and everything is
clean. Just imagine I would answer this message somewhere completely
else and would have to start it with @Thomas. Furthermore I can't
see any good ways to track read messages, scoring, using the whole
thing with the keyboard alone.
So what's the solution? Actually it could be quite easy: Become
agnostic of the presentation format and deploy something that can be
used through *both* the web and email. Theoretically this could be
achieved with a threaded forum with an included email gateway so
that the normal user can use his webforum, but I get the gatewayed
emails which I can display in my email program however I
want. Unfortunately I still haven't seen any of the commonly used
forums that supports an email gateway, even threading alone is quite
rare.
But now comes the GOOD news. I see a way which could satisfy us all,
is set up within 5 minutes and has zero maintenance cost: We just
set up a Google Group. To the user, it just looks like a plain
normal web forum and can either look like phpBB or be shown with
threading. Here a random list as an example:
http://groups.google.com/group/DotNetDevelopment/topics
But the good part is that it's also a mailing list, so those of us
who prefer email can use it this way. And I can read it over NNTP on
Gmane. :)
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