I agree with Ben,<br><br>if people were mystified as to what the electron club does then this should be addressed via the website. It makes no sense to have to join a mailing list in order to get a better idea of what something is. The idea of a wiki for each group sounds good, and perhaps a general overhaul of the site.<br>
<br>
I don't agree that a forum is a great way for new members to find the
EC, surely the existing web presence should be enhanced to provide more
information, as previously mentioned the wiki pages. Forums are however a
nice security vector. It's trivial to search google for forums which
are running exploitable versions of the forum software, a nice way to
quickly harvest potential targets.<br><br>A system may exist which combines the functionality of a forum and a mailing list. The best of both worlds? Perhaps. If one doesn't exist the functionality to email each post to the existing mailing lists would not be too difficult to implement, making this work the other way round will be a little more complicated. If I have time this weekend I'll do some investigating.<br>
<br>I don't like the idea of people being able to edit their posts, this leads to problems. Often people seem to delete post content entirely, or edit them so much that any replies no longer make sense. Would edited post have to be resubmitted to the mailing list? IMHO it's best that posts are left as they are. If someone makes a mistake I'm sure we're all grown up enough to either work out the typo or to post again for clarification.<br>
<br>If we were to have a forum, I'd prefer that it were kept very simple, no avatars, no signatures, don't allow uploading of files (e.g. photographs, documents), store them elsewhere and link to them if required. Anything to reduce the overhead (from both the server and client perspective) and maintenance. Often people don't take usability into account, just because it's possible to have an Web 2.0/AJAX GUI to a forum, doesn't mean it should be a requirement.<br>
<br>Cheers<br><br>Martin<br><br>On 13 January 2011 23:19, Clive Mitchell <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bigclive1@gmail.com">bigclive1@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
I'm with sticking to the mailing list. Especially because it does<br>
have an archive.<br>
<br>
One other advantage of the mailing list is that you can download all<br>
the new messages and then browse them offline. I know that seems a<br>
bit retro, but there are times that Internet access is expensive or<br>
limited.<br>
<br>
With mailing systems like Gmail you can set up labels and tag specific<br>
keywords so that all the electron mail will automatically go into it's<br>
own area.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
On 13 January 2011 23:14, Ben Dembroski <<a href="mailto:ben@dembroski.net">ben@dembroski.net</a>> wrote:<br>
> It seems like it's a mixed bag of responses.<br>
><br>
> I'm now wondering if introducing forums into the mix would complicate<br>
> matters without making the club significantly more usable.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
</div>--<br>
<font color="#888888">Clive Mitchell<br>
</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
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