Re: Re: Roku-tech Digest, Vol 10, Issue 35

On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 03:45:55PM -0700, Tom Tubbiola scratched on the wall:

> I much prefer Web Forums. You can search out what you need. You don't have
> people replying and quoting the ENTIRE LAST DIGEST in every damn post.

  "Me too" posts are a problem, but they're just as common in forums as
  they are in mailing list.  The only difference is digest are a bit
  longer.  Luckily this list has seen few instances when people quoted
  the _whole_ digest, although it does happen.  I get more annoyed
  about the subjects.

  Personally, I would agree with you that digests are a big mistake,
  and that they should be "read only."  People responding to digests
  break the threading of the discussion, and no matter how many times
  you beat them over the head, they can never seem to remember to
  adjust the subject (for example, this one).  On mailing lists that I
  run, I prefer to disable the ability to receive digests at all, and
  if I can't do that, I setup filters so that any list submissions
  with a subject that looks like a digest subject are rejected.  Most
  modern digests look like someone's bad attempt to make mailing lists
  look like web forums.  If you don't want lots of messages showing up
  in your mailbox all day, setup a filter to dump them into their own
  mailbox that you can look at whenever-- for example, on the drive
  home (my wife sometimes drives); one other reason I dislike web forums
  (our car *does* have several cat5 RJ-45 jacks, but they sure aren't
  Ethernet jacks!).

> If it's something I'm interested in I MAKE TIME to scan the forums.

  True, but I have to admit I'm not *that* interested.  This stuff is
  pretty cool, but it's just a media player and in the global scope of
  my life it is pretty unimportant-- kind of like the TV and everything
  else in the AV rack.

  I like to keep informed on what people are working on, but it isn't
  worth spending a lot of time on-- even if I can remember to do so
  (which is the bigger issue).  That's why I like having the mail
  dumped right into my lap.  A good set of mail filters and a good
  threaded mail reader and I'm set.

> I am much more likely to just delete an email digest because I don't have
> time to read about a bunch of topics I could care less about in order to
> find the one thing I want to read about.

  Sounds about like my reaction to web forums. Even with the forum
  categories, things frequently devolve into a huge free-for-all with
  little organization.  If you really want to keep up, you need to
  pretty much scan everything.  These are all things a good threaded mail
  reader will deal with quite nicely (or NNTP reader, for that matter).

  I think your comment gets back to the point that was raised weeks and
  weeks ago-- the list should likely be split up into more
  product-specific lists and user/tech lists, so those that don't own
  one of everything can limit their messages.  My guess is the folks a
  Roku didn't want to spend the time to do that because they were
  already working on the forums and knew the list had a limited lifetime.
  Too bad.

   -j

-- 
                     Jay A. Kreibich | Integration & Software Eng.
                        [email protected] | Campus IT & Edu. Svcs.
          <http://www.uiuc.edu/~jak> | University of Illinois at U/C