[Dxbase] Another suggestion

[Ron Stordahl N5IN]

Neals web forum http://abrohamnealsoftware.com/community/index.php is user configurable to notify via e-mail all new postings, replies to your postings, I think there are 4 or 5 different options regarding providing e-mail notifications.  Selecting them all would seem to be much like the current reflector, but limited to just new postings and replies to your responses would seem reasonable to me.  The notifications provide a link to the forum, where you can see everything.

One big advantage of the web forum is the ability to search, something that is very poorly provided in the current reflector.

I get a lot of e-mail with the reflector based groups, so I have it pared down to the essentials like the DXBase reflector.  

The web based forums do work for me, even Yahoo and Google groups are preferable in my view.

My 2 cents.

Ron, N5IN




________________________________
From: Brendan Minish <ei6iz.brendan at gmail.com>
To: Ron Stordahl N5IN <ronn5in-dxbase1 at yahoo.com>
Cc: Jim Dawson <k9dd at jasystems.com>; Dxbase at mailman.qth.net
Sent: Saturday, October 3, 2009 4:13:49 PM
Subject: Re: [Dxbase] Another suggestion

On Sat, 2009-10-03 at 12:33 -0700, Ron Stordahl N5IN wrote:

> 
> However, I would suggest people switch to http://abrohamnealsoftware.com/community/index.php  Many more features
> than a simple e-mail reflector!  


I have many many subscriptions to mailing lists, my email client handles
them all very nicely. Gmail indexes them all for me and it's easy to
keep track of what is going on 

I also use web forums from time to time, I find them slow and hard to
manage once you have to deal with being a user on more than a few of
them. 

There are pluses and minuses of both ways of handling support and
customer interaction but I for one would only be inclined to visiting a
forum, when I have an issue I need solved whereas I see all the traffic
on the email list. 

I saw a K3 related issue today and was able (I think) offer a solution,
within an hour or two of the question being posted. If this moves to a
forum turnaround times will be much longer and much more erratic for
this user - user type of assistance which is at present so common on
this list.

On the other hand forums work quite well for large corporations (Vmware
is one I have to use from time to time) who manage complex closed source
projects. Here the forums have paid tech support people and paid
developers whose Job it is to respond in a timely and helpful manner to
forum postings and are not relying on other users take handle much of
the support burden. 

This is a low volume mailing list and a great deal of the interaction is
user - user. Moving to a forum based system will harm this User - User
interaction greatly 


-- 
73
Brendan EI6IZ