Re: Moderated forum for linux-kernel

[Olivier Galibert]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 10:31:30PM +0000, Andrew Walrond wrote:
> Forgive if this has been discussed before, but has anyone considered 
> hosting the linux-kernel on a web-based forum as used extensively elsewhere?
> 
> I can think of advantages;
> 
> Better Thread organisation and seperate topic areas for drivers, 
> patches, ide, ...

Any decent mail client will give you quality threads, much better than
any current web forum software (because you get a tree instead of the
flat crap they give you).  And separate topic areas already exist,
they're called multiple mailing-lists.

> Being able to cheery pick threads of interest, and completely ignore others

Get a decent mail client.

> Not having to dump your inbox after a week away just to catch up

Get a decent mail client.

> Moderated forums (Off-topic threads policed and deleted)

Post-moderation sucks, and opens some interesting legal issues.
Pre-moderation is way too slow and labor intensive.

> Read only forums (write for registered/invited members)

You can have that with mailing-lists.  Cf linux-announce.  Not very
useful in practice.

> I'm sure somebody will enlighten me regarding the disadvantages. :)

Much slower than a local mailbox.
No filtering.
No choice of presentation (or not enough).
No scoring.
Much higher bandwidth needs.
Hard to archive.
Can't forward posts.
Can't grep posts.
Can't save some posts in a contiguous mailbox and patch -p1 them.

And the most annoying part, people feel anonymous on web forums and as
a result post any crap just because they can, while most of tend to
take having to put their email address with usually they real name in
it more seriously.

  OG.