[ELECTRON] members Digest, Vol 23, Issue 8

[Simon Yuill]

In terms of a combined forum and email system GroupServer might be worth
a look:

http://groupserver.org

http://onlinegroups.net/sites/tour/

An overhaul of the EC site would indeed be good, and more people posting
stuff there to keep it updated.

best wishes
Si



Martin McGrath wrote:
> 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
> <mailto: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
>     <mailto: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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