[gNewSense-users] My two cents on web forums: don't like 'em.

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Brian Brazil wrote:
> I see there's been no interest in this.

I don't like web forums.  They often don't integrate with mailing lists, 
they are editable by the forum owner well after posts are made, and they 
often crash or are rearranged so bookmarks become useless.  Some of them 
have a lot of frilly junk like user icons (animated or not).  I've yet 
to see one that lets you download an mbox file so you can integrate the 
messages into an email client.  Many of them either don't support 
threading or are configured to turn threading off.  Web forums prevent 
me from doing the sophisticated filtering I can do with email.  GPG 
signatures are largely incompatible with web forums.  Web forums strike 
me as a poor reinvention of the wheel.

I'd much rather let search engines index textual web archives of mailing 
lists.

Perhaps I don't see what gNewSense GNU/Linux is doing that genuinely 
needs a web forum.