[vtkusers] Forum rather than a mailing list

[John Drescher]

> Really a non VTK question, I am just asking for people's thoughts.

I prefer the mailing list. If all the kitware sites were a forum I
would certainly not participate as much in any of them since it would
take a more time then showing up in my email box.

>Does
> anyone else find the mailing list style discussion that VTK uses more
> difficult to deal with than a regular internet forum?

No way. I use gmail and have a filter that puts every kitware email
into a single place. And since gmail has 7.6 GB of space I do not
delete (non spam) messages from any of the lists. So I can search any
message from the last 3 years pretty quickly. And I can also very
easily reply to any of these messages.

> I may well be missing
> something - maybe there are better tools for viewing it rather than the
> email digest (which makes it difficult to follow threads), e.g. Nabble seems
> to do a reasonable job of making the mailing list look like a forum style
> discussion, but it is quite basic. Has there ever been a move to go to a
> forum style discussion page? I am aware that there may well be very good
> reasons that the mailing list is as it is - someone has to maintain and
> moderate a forum for example. Any thoughts?
>

wine has a form + mailing list integration at winehq.org. I never ever
go to the forum but I do participate in the mailing list. This works
okay, however there are some annoyances. On the forum some times the
user does not quote what they are replying to. Also the forum users
post bump posts which is annoying to mailing list users.

John