On Monday 14 April 2008 01:10, Arthur wrote: > Many mailing lists are not well represented on Google. Many web forums require you to sign in just to search, with the same end result. Additionally, every web forum package has its own search algorithms and a different interface with which to use them, and some are dumb enough that you wouldn't even be able to search for the word "JACK", for example, due to a minimum query length requirement. They are much less effective than either Google or my own email client's search feature, to say nothing of pcregrep. > no one is suggesting that those who prefer mailing lists should > stop using them. As long as there's a possibility that critical mass will shift to the walled gardens of web forums (as happened a year or two ago in one community I'm no longer a part of thanks to that shift), I'm going to do whatever I can to prevent it from happening. It may not look like a zero-sum game, but it increasingly is one. Web forums turn working communities into help desks cum high school cafeterias. They are very well suited to posting pictures of your cat yawning with a caption written in script kiddie, but very poorly suited to actually solving problems and then having the solution preserved for posterity. Anyway, I'm sure we'll be having this conversation again in a couple years when people start talking about moving mailing lists and web forums into Second Life. Rob _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
