[ELECTRON] members Digest, Vol 23, Issue 8

[Martin McGrath]

I agree with Ben,

if people were mystified as to what the electron club does then this should
be addressed via the website. It makes no sense to have to join a mailing
list in order to get a better idea of what something is. The idea of a wiki
for each group sounds good, and perhaps a general overhaul of the site.

I don't agree that a forum is a great way for new members to find the EC,
surely the existing web presence should be enhanced to provide more
information, as previously mentioned the wiki pages. Forums are however a
nice security vector. It's trivial to search google for forums which are
running exploitable versions of the forum software, a nice way to quickly
harvest potential targets.

A system may exist which combines the functionality of a forum and a mailing
list. The best of both worlds? Perhaps. If one doesn't exist the
functionality to email each post to the existing mailing lists would not be
too difficult to implement, making this work the other way round will be a
little more complicated. If I have time this weekend I'll do some
investigating.

I don't like the idea of people being able to edit their posts, this leads
to problems. Often people seem to delete post content entirely, or edit them
so much that any replies no longer make sense. Would edited post have to be
resubmitted to the mailing list? IMHO it's best that posts are left as they
are. If someone makes a mistake I'm sure we're all grown up enough to either
work out the typo or to post again for clarification.

If we were to have a forum, I'd prefer that it were kept very simple, no
avatars, no signatures, don't allow uploading of files (e.g. photographs,
documents), store them elsewhere and link to them if required. Anything to
reduce the overhead (from both the server and client perspective) and
maintenance. Often people don't take usability into account, just because
it's possible to have an Web 2.0/AJAX GUI to a forum, doesn't mean it should
be a requirement.

Cheers

Martin

On 13 January 2011 23:19, Clive Mitchell <bigclive1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm with sticking to the mailing list.  Especially because it does
> have an archive.
>
> One other advantage of the mailing list is that you can download all
> the new messages and then browse them offline.  I know that seems a
> bit retro, but there are times that Internet access is expensive or
> limited.
>
> With mailing systems like Gmail you can set up labels and tag specific
> keywords so that all the electron mail will automatically go into it's
> own area.
>
> On 13 January 2011 23:14, Ben Dembroski <ben at dembroski.net> wrote:
> > It seems like it's a mixed bag of responses.
> >
> > I'm now wondering if introducing forums into the mix would complicate
> > matters without making the club significantly more usable.
>
>
>
> --
> Clive Mitchell
>
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