Re: browser interface to forums please?

On Wed, 5 Apr 2017 09:31:59 -0700, Adrian Klaver
<adrian(dot)klaver(at)aklaver(dot)com> wrote:

>On 04/05/2017 09:17 AM, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>
>> This has been tried a number of times. I'ts been a couple of years since
>> I last saw one, but multiple people have set up forums, either mirrored
>> or not. They have all died because of either lack of usage or because
>> the person who did it disappeared.
>
>Mostly, because they did not work well and the folks on this end of the
>process had to do more work to get the information necessary to answer
>the question. I know I eventually stopped responding to the questions
>from those sources because it was difficult to follow the information
>flow. Namely you had to crawl back up to the forum to get information
>and then the email thread had mix of information that made it through on
>its own and some subset of information that dedicated people pulled in
>from the forum. That mix depended on dedication level and time available.

That's the same observation I made about list participants who
subscribe through Google Groups ... they often don't [think to] make
the effort to quote or attribute properly because *they* can simply
look back up the thread to see what was written and by whom.

This makes it difficult to follow a discussion via email, and Google's
list handling is flawed - it sometimes breaks the underlying list
threading [while keeping its own GUI correct], and broken threads can
be hard to follow even with a decent news reader.
[Postgresql lists are available through NNTP: e.g., at Gmane.org]

YMMV,
George