[Haskell] Re: Haskell web forum

[Niklas Broberg]

On 9/20/06, Aaron Denney <wnoise at ofb.net> wrote:
> And I disagree with you.  Web forums are usenet reinvented poorly.
> It's impossible to keep track of what's new, threading is either poor or
> nonexistent.  Mailing lists with searchable archives work well.  gmane
> provides a nice usenet interface to mailing lists.

I don't recognize the forums I frequent in your description at all. I
have absolutely no problem keeping up with what's new. In fact I find
it a lot easier since many of the topics take place in subforums that
I know don't interest me, so I don't even need to go there to check.
With this mailing list, I have to manually "mark as read" about 2/3 of
all incoming mails because they don't (from the title) interest me,
and I have to read a few that don't interest me because I couldn't
tell from the title.

Threading also works as well as could be expected, better than
threading in gmail for instance, so I don't see the problem here
either.

> > It's all there, all the time.
>
> Yes, that's part of the problem.

How is that? You mean because all the old stuff gets in the way of the
new? Then you're just using a bad forum software that can't properly
point out the new stuff for you. I agree that not all forums are good,
but there are definitely those that are.

> > It is also  easy to create sub-groups/forums for specific projects,
>
> This is the one semi-useful thing.  Of course, what you end up with is
> another not-so-useful forum.

This is probably the one most useful thing yes. I wouldn't call it
semi-useful though. Just remember all the responses that the HCAR gets
each year of the form "wow how many cool projects are out there that I
had no clue existed". What if all (or many of) those projects were
actually there, on the forums, where everyone knew where to look?

And your last sentence, I just don't understand. "not-so-useful" just
because it's a forum, or did you mean somethine else as well?

/Niklas