Forums are OK, but second-best. The problem I see with a forum is probably the thing you like about it: messages are broken up by (arbitrary) "topic" or "subject". Basically, each thread in a forum operates like its own little mailing list - that enables someone to ignore parts of the discussion. They will then inevitably miss something that they needed to have seen.
"But how else can you manage the volume of messages?" I hear you cry. Well, having only a single "thread" forces you to use social pressure to keep the discussion on topic.
A forum can have obscure corners which people start to use for off-topic discussions, or general mouthing-off or project gossip. That kind of noise can't be tolerated on a mailing list - because there's no good way to ignore it. So the off topic stuff is pushed out, and the discussion remains mostly on-topic.
The "social pressure" that keeps mailing list discussions on-topic is often interpreted by newbies as "rude people shouting at them", and perhaps that's accurate. But the end result is worthwhile.
You've nailed it, except I still think it's a feature not a bug. I think you might think that way too, if you'd been involved in an open source project with tens of thousands of non-technical users.
I love them, really I do, but it only takes 0.1% of the user-base to naively believe that it's easier to ask for help than to RTFM, and bang - there goes 110% of your time dealing with them.
Try being an active member on 50 forums. Try being an active member on 50 mailing lists.
When there's some software that lets me see all activity from all forums in one place, I might consider using one again :P (RSS is a good start in theory, but I've not seen a single forum which uses it effectively)
Why? Mailing lists have a common UI (your email client), they are easier to archive locally, messages are processable entities (can be easily tagged, filtered, forwarded, etc) and they can be used when the service is offline.
The only thing missing in a mailing list is a good archive for new members; the web UIs are usually terrible. Personally, I wish I could just get an archive file (zip, tar, etc) of a certain period of time.
I think "a good archive for new members" is more important than just the "only" suggests.
The reason it's lacking shows the problem with mailing lists: they restrict participation to those who were members at the time. Yes, there's a limited ability to have search after the fact, but most of the web UIs are awful, and the search is weak.
Worse still is if you join late and somehow find a thread from 2010, there's no way to revive it with updated information or corrections. So the archives suffer terribly from bitrot, in some cases sending latecomers down the wrong path for years to come.
In a well-designed forum, by contrast, threads "live" forever. When something useful needs to be said or asked, a thread can spring back to life. As a result, their archives remain useful for longer, and they don't need to suffer nearly as much from newcomers asking the same old FAQs, either.
To boot, with the right forum, you can also have posts sent to your email, for all the local benefits you mention.
Fair enough, but frankly well-designed and well-run forums are few and far between. And even less support real threading, which I consider a killer feature for this kind of discussions.
> The only thing missing in a mailing list is a good archive for new members; the web UIs are usually terrible. Personally, I wish I could just get an archive file (zip, tar, etc) of a certain period of time.
Three data points/opinions:
- at least some mailing lists let you download an archive file for a given month, e.g. [0].
- I much prefer navigating the web interface of a mailing list than navigating a forum, simply because mostforumslackproperthreading, not to mention the bazillion of blinking .GIFs, unnecessary Javascript and all that other superfluous crap that is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
- Not to mention that searching a mailing list archive is trivial if you keep it locally and even if you don’t, it will still work. Trying to find something on e.g. talk.maemo.org, I always have to resort to Google with some site: operator, and even then the results are usually worse than those returned by a comparable search run on the web archive of a mailing list.
I can't figure why "forums" and "mailing lists" are two separate things. Making a nice unified mailing-list/forum hybrid doesn't sound impossible... honestly though, most maling-list web-views are terrible and excruciating to navigate.
Give me a big threaded forum where each "category" corresponds to its own mailing list (so you can just avoid email-subbing to the "offtopic" one). Then you can also include some nice secondary features like upvotes/downvotes and the like.
> Making a nice unified mailing-list/forum hybrid doesn't sound impossible...
That's basically what Google Groups used to be (I haven't used them in awhile, so no clue if they've changed significantly since then): at its heart, it's NNTP. You choose to receive messages as they come, or in digest form. You can either reply to the email, or login to the web interface and reply there. The web interface groups discrete email subjects as separate forum posts (with some mild intelligence to lump "some topic" and "re: some topic" together).
It's not without its own set of issues, but I found it a good compromise since those who only wanted to interact with the email interface could keep that, while those that wanted a more full-featured forum experience could do so as well.
Still using a mailing list nowadays is like using that web-to-email gateway Stallman uses.