Digital BW, The Print

> From: Martin
>
> Another most appreciated advantage of a "real" forum is the possibility to
> edit your posting.
>
> This is useful if inacurate information is being detected after
> sending the message away.

Well, I, for one, doubt I'll ever participate if there is no mailing list or
newsgroup. I've signed up on a couple of dozen different forums on various
subjects, and I never get around to visiting them except maybe once a year
when I have a question. Unlike mailing lists, you have to take affirmative
steps to go to a forum, and I just never remember. If I was only interested
in one thing, I might remember, but I'm on a couple dozen mailing lists, and
I participate in another dozen newsgroups, so bulletin-board style forums
just never get my attention.

The worst problem with a forum is that when you encounter a message that you
want to keep, perhaps because it contains some information you want to refer
to later, you can't save it on your machine without copying it to the
clipboard, pasting it into a text file, navigating to some folder, and
typing in a name to save it under. With a mailing list, all you have to do
is not delete the message, and it remains in the mail folder, which you can
sort by sender, subject or date.

Newsgroups aren't bad (although privately hosted ones are better than Usenet
ones). I only have to open one program to be presented with all the
newsgroups I'm interested in, and see which ones have new messages. Outlook
Express lets me tag messages that are of interest, so they remain in the
cache even after they're gone from the server.

There is some software out there that can present a message repository as a
mailing list, newsgroup and web-based forum, depending upon the preference
of the user. I think it's from Lyris.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...