I was just thinking about the comments regarding the failings of Slash, vs
email. I'm not a great fan of slash, or web based forums, either; they look
pretty, but they can be slow and clumsy to use.
Even though email is a bit of a dinosaur, it's strength is in it's
distributed nature. We all have our own client programs, chosen by
ourselves, to organise our mail as we see fit. This has the benefits of
being accessible offline, being faster, and being vastly more customisable.
On the other side, email is dodgy; you can lose messages for various
reasons, you need to handle backing up yourself, and your mail tends to be
hidden away on one machine; certainly it's less accessible than a
centralised, web-based system.
What would be ideal would be a combination. If you could do Slash, but have
an email version, so that people could receive it if desired, possibly
easily linking the emails back to the slash site by embedded urls, then we
might start to have something more useful.
Alternatively, how about a custom client, which presents the "slash" style
forum, but stores messages locally if desired; then you could use it
offline, post while offline, have faster access, etc. Maybe this is just a
slicked-up news group?
A very agreeable hybrid is any site which has a headline mailing list, so
that the audience can subscribe to headlines, and click in the email to view
full posts online. The only news type websites that I frequently visit are
those with this functionality, and I always go via the headline emails. Has
Extrodot got any plans along these lines? Personally, it will make the
difference between me never visiting it, or checking it's content once a
day.
Emlyn
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:50:16 MDT