Roku-tech Digest, Vol 10, Issue 35

[Jay A. Kreibich]

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