From gabru@comsec.net Wed Jun 08 13:41:20 2011
Subject:RE: [OT] BBS Forum (Was: CLIP YOUR %*^*$#!@ POSTS!!!)

Hey Bruce, have you compared the Google Groups to the Yahoo Forums? Is there any
advantage of one over the other?

Gary

From: CloneWheel@yahoogroups.com [mailto:CloneWheel@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Bruce Wahler
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2011 10:54 AM
To: CloneWheel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [CWSG] [OT] BBS Forum (Was: CLIP YOUR %*^*$#!@ POSTS!!!)

I brought up the idea of a server-based ('cloud' -- I hate that term)
email system many years ago, when I was moderator (2003?). The general
consensus was that people liked things the way they were, but maybe we
should revisit the topic ...

The CW forum started as a Voce group, with about 20 members. A simple
email list was sufficient: Members sent their emails directly to the
group, or they sent them to me and I passed them on. We moved to the
eGroups forum (bought by Yahoo) when the list started approaching 50
members. An email forum works well for 50-500 members, and cuts down on
the moderators' workload.

When it gets larger than that, daily digests get large and the
probability that a reader will find threads that he/she *isn't*
interested in goes up. The nice thing about BBS forums is that each
member can look at the list of topics and choose to read or ignore them
individually. Some of the slicker forum systems have lists of recent
topics, and ways to 'subscribe' to threads of interest. Most also
provide U2U support, to allow members to send emails to each other, even
if they don't know each other's email address. I belong to more than 25
forums, and most of them are BBS style.

This method still requires moderators and joining, but the number of
emails is much lower. Also, because any advertising and how-to guides
stay on the site, the size of emails is generally smaller. (You might
have noticed that half of the unwanted lines in replies are Yahoo's
constant reminders on how to use the forum!) Server forums also allow
dividing up the group into sub-topics without losing the overall 'club'
atmosphere. I can choose to only look at the section called 'Nord
Keyboards' today, but broaden my reading tomorrow. I can also volunteer
to moderate the group called 'Nord Sucks' without
taking on moderation of the whole forum.

Technically speaking, Yahoo Groups has *some* online forum
capabilities. One can read every post from the Yahoo website, plus view
photos and files, without receiving emails. What Yahoo *doesn't* do
very well is add the frills like thread subscription and U2U. If I
don't subscribe to emails or digests, and go away for a few days, it's
pretty likely that I'll miss a topic or two, or even an important reply
to a question I asked. If I want to revisit an old topic, I need to
start a new thread, and risk having a lot of the conversation repeated
in the new discussion.

What to you folks think about BBS forums? Does anyone on this list run
a server with Ideal BB or AspNet or NextBBS already on it?

Regards,

-BW

Bruce Wahler
Ashby Solutions.com™
bruce@ashbysolutions.com
http://music.ashbysolutions.com
877.55.ASHBY (877.552.7429)

On 6/8/2011 1:02 PM, rafael2pop wrote:
> Don't have seventy forum subscriptions but more than ten and still think that having all the email "on the cloud" (the new old magic word after Mc new Lion)is the way to go.
>