ADMIN: What if ClassicCmp were a blog?

From: Adrian Vickers <avickers_at_solutionengineers.com>
Date: Thu Jan 16 04:13:00 2003

At 02:41 16/01/2003, Jeffrey Sharp wrote:

>In my quest to cover every aspect, to think about every permutation of what
>ClassicCmp *could* be in the future, I have yet another question to ask
>ClassicCmp subscribers: What if ClassicCmp were a weblog, in the style of
>Slashdot or Kuro5hin?

In a word: Bleuch.

I've used all kinds of elecronic comms in my past, from BBS, Usenet,
mailing lists & web boards. IMHO, by far the best (in terms of threading,
bandwidth, etc.) has been Usenet. Therefore, if ClassicCmp was to change at
all, I'd prefer it to move to a Netnews server.

However, I'd be more happy if it didn't move at all...

There's been plenty of "no!!!" arguments here already, and mention has been
made of a dual interface (blog + mailing list) - and the latter is the one
I'd favour. By all means implement a blog, but make it an "as well as"
rather than "instead of". This would be useful to me, since I am
periodically away from my main computer (onto which all my e-mail arrives)
for several days at a time. Until I pull my finger out & get my own
internal mail server available to me, only client computers on my internal
network can pull mail from it, so when I'm away I don't get classiccmp -
and three other mailing list's - e-mails. So when away, I'd use the blog.

The one thing mailing lists don't do (or do well if they do do it) is
threading. Most e-mail clients wouldn't be able to make head nor tail of it
anyway. One of the few things that cheeses me off about ClassicCmp is
situations like last night - suddenly there's a whole scree of messages
waiting, and I've no idea what is in reply to what, unless some decent
quoting is involved. And I'm as guilty of that as anyone - Eudora, bless
it's cotton socks, sticks "At [time/date], you wrote:" whenever I quote a
message, which means I manually have to go put the name of the person I'm
replying to in there, and I frequently forget.

>What is your opinion? Let's answer this one in-list, please.

IMHO: By all means implement a blog, but don't remove or change the
existing e-mail interface - or, rather, by all means change it, but please
make those changes totally transparent to the user.

-- 
Cheers, Ade.
Be where it's at, B-Racing!
http://b-racing.com
Received on Thu Jan 16 2003 - 04:13:00 GMT

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