[plug] Forum Software

[Adrian Woodley]

Forums have some distinct advantages as well though:

* You don't have to download/read each thread - just the ones you're 
interested in.

* Most forums promote the active threads to the top of the page.

* Content and archives are easier to maintain in a forum. Its very hard 
to delete inappropriate posts from a mailing list, once they've been 
delivered to the readers. This exacerbates flames and makes it harder to 
filter noise.

* The questions and the answers are kept in the same place. With a 
mailing list, the questions are asked from your mail client of choice, 
the previous answers are in a web archive.

* Forum posts are supplied with their context. If you clean out your 
plug mail box, and someone replies to a post from 6 months ago, there's 
limited context included with it. A reply to a forum attaches all the 
previous context.

There's probably others, but I really should do some more work.

Adrian

Cameron Patrick wrote:
> Adrian Woodley wrote:
> 
>> Following last night's discussion at the workshop, I've done a quick 
>> investigation into forum software. Using the criteria of "what looks 
>> hot", this is a rough list of what I feel could be contenders:
> 
> As mentioned last night and in mail to committee@ (are you on it? I know
> a lot of people who aren't on committee are subscribed :-), I feel that
> setting up forums is potentially quite divisive.  Furthermore, no other
> LUGs in the country do it.
> 
>> phpBB - http://www.phpbb.com/
> 
> Mmmm, security sploits ++.
> 
> Cameron (cynical)
> 
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
> http://www.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.linux.org.au