On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 20:54, Peter Münster wrote:
What are the advantages of a forum over a mailing list?
Apart from what Hannes wrote, one of advantages that I see is that for someone who is not actively participating, it's a bit annoying to recieve 40 mails per day that do not interest him at all just in order to be able to recieve the answer. If there would be some software, I would prefer a solution that would work as a hybrid between forum and mailing list though (for someone who is not willing to be subscribed, it would work as a forum with ability to mark that one wants to get a notification when someone answers). For others it would work as a mailing list ... It would also be nice to be able to add some additional marks. For example, I would find it helpful if users (or maybe a few moderators) could mark threads with: - bug report / feature request / question for usage / discussion - waiting for satisfactory answer / resolved / fixed - some topic-related marks then it would also be easier to search through archives (for example if one would decide to write an extensive testbed including all the bugs that have ever appeared or if Hans had plenty of time and decided to review pending feature requests etc.). I was impressed by HyperNews, although it could offer a bit better user interface (example of usage: http://hypernews.slac.stanford.edu/HyperNews/geant4/cindex). Mojca