>Please note that we've never said "our site is way better than
.>yahoo", but it is definitely different, and something we can improve.
This is good, but currently it is not able to offer the same basic functionality, and until it does it is not really a suitable replacement
> I also don't like sifting and sorting through the dozen or so
> various glorantha/runequest related yahoo groups I am a member of.
A situation not helped by adding forums on top of the existing lists...
> It's no fun seeing a standard announcement for something like a
> convention, or submissions to the next issue of a fanzine appearing
> on many of them, but if you want the different readerships of all of
> them to see something you pretty much don't have a choice.
Again, adding an additional place for discussion won't help this situation. If you want to reach all the possible readership you will now need to post on the forums in addition to all the mailing lists.
> I can easily see the simplicity of "just getting the postings
> emailed" but I tire of just "page-downing" through many of the posts
> (often lengthy because of default over-quoting).
>
I'd approve of encouraging people to learn to quote appropriately, but that is a separate issue
> I also note that many of the glorantha/runequest related yahoo
> groups, not to mention many other stand-alone personal forums, often
> are low in traffic. I often only get a digest from them because
> somebody posted an announcement on all of them. Yes, they all get
> emailed to me with virtually no effort, but that doesn't mean I
> enjoy what they send me any more than if they took effort to get to > me.
I'm not sure I understand the last part of this - enjoyment of the message is a function of it's content not the route it took to be delivered. But the low volume is part of the benefit of the mailing list. How often are you prepared to go visit a website to see if it has been updated? If you go there every day for a month and it hasn't changed, do you continue to do so the following month? Then when it is updated you miss getting the information in a timely manner, because you stopped going to look regularly
> As for "less effort" to see what's happening on our forums, I
> believe that RSS feeds and some of the email notifications for
> replies to a topic that we offer can close that gap, if you feel
> there is one.
A notification of replies does not offer anything like the same functionality as a mailing list. Most importantly it does not tell me about anything I'm not already aware of. Also if there is something which I am aware of and interested in, but have nothing to add to the discussion, I get no notification of new messages.
Even when I am getting notification of responses, unless it gives me the full text, it is still sending me back to the forum to actually find out what has been said
> Some people have posted here that our website fails because of the
> lack of it just emailing everything to someone, but to be fair, that
> doesn't mean our forums fail in general,
It is not a complaint about *your* website or *your* forums, but a complaint about forums in general not being a good replacement for mailing lists
> they have just been labelled as a failure for that particular user,
> based solely on what they personally prefer.
One could equally argue that some people are arguing that Forums are a better solution when they are merely better for that particular user, and alternative solutions are available that would better suit all users...
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