Separation to community board and center board

[Ivan Denisov]

Please rephrase or correct the grammar. I did my best and I just don't understand what you are trying to say.

The message you are sugesting to put then member is ready to vote:
"Everything I would have said has been said, so I am ready to vote. If others still want to discuss, that's OK for me."
Let's ask members do they are ready to add this message in each discussion thread?

[Josef Templ]

In my opinion, the public section of the board should be moved to a usenet newsgroup.
This would be a successor of the BlackBox mailing list provided by ominc so far,
which can then be discontinued.

The advantages are:
- no need to create a new account and to login; the user is identified by its e-mail address,
- reading of news and e-mail from a central place when using your preferred e-mail reader as news reader,
- familiar user interface for reading the news when using your preferred e-mail reader,
- much more convenient reading of the news when using your preferred reader,
- convenient way of responding either to newsgroup or to sender via e-mail,
- your own postings are kept in the sent mail folder of your e-mail client.

Reading of news is also possible via a web interface, e.g. Google groups.
Long term archiving of the news and fast search is also provided by Google groups, for example.
Since there is not really much traffic, there should be only a single newsgroup
covering all aspects of BlackBox Component builder just as there was only one
BlackBox mailing list so far.
The newsgroup can be unmoderated because spamming is not such a problem
anymore as it was a few years ago.

A possible name for the newsgroup is comp.lang.blackbox, but this should be discussed
separately because there are many possibilities and each of them has its own
advantages and disadvantages.

- Josef

[ReneK]

What about doing it the other way round?

We could move the center member discussion to usenet or a google-list, and have the public part (center and non-center posters) on the forum.

For the center members, this would mean that their discussions are archived and readable for the public (those were the main objections, IIRC, against an "email list"), and yet the center members had all the benefits of an eMail discussion (posts are automatically delivered, so you do not need to take the time to go to a website to look things up, posts are both threaded and sorted by date/time, the media is totally simple, no moderator needed).

The wider community would still be discussing things in the best way for them, that is in a forum, though we would need administrators for that part.

[cfbsoftware]

That's enough discussion for me, let's vote.

[Josef Templ]

What about doing it the other way round?

The center needs the voting facility of the forum, not the public.
So it cannot be done the other way round.
The phpBB forum is a nightmare to follow a thread. It requires too many
clicks to get from one posting to the next and to follow a thread and
a hierarchy of replies. If you try to use a decent news reader you will see the difference
immediately. In Outlook Express, for example, you simply press space and go
through all the new postings, without any navigation overhead.
For the center the forum software may be acceptable because
we get the advantage of the voting facility in exchange for the inconveniences.
For the public I cannot see any advantage in using this kind of forum software.

[ReneK]

Well, the center needs the voting, OK. But for normal communication, what's wrong with a google list or usenet? We could communicate there and vote on the board, couldn't we?

[DGDanforth]

I favor Josef Templ's suggestion of usenet.

In general, I do not wish to log into any site just to find out what is happening.
I prefer to be emailed directly with the latest comments (as it happens now
with the BlackBox mailing list).

-Doug Danforth

[cfbsoftware]

I prefer to be emailed directly with the latest comments

I prefer to be able to choose the time to be interrupted. I monitor a dozen or so forums and it takes ten minutes or so to check them twice daily. I would NOT have been happy if I my mailbox had been bombarded by the 350 or so messages that have appeared here in the past few weeks.

[Ivan Denisov]

I prefer to be emailed directly with the latest comments

I prefer to be able to choose the time to be interrupted. I monitor a dozen or so forums and it takes ten minutes or so to check them twice daily. I would NOT have been happy if I my mailbox had been bombarded by the 350 or so messages that have appeared here in the past few weeks.

+1

[Josef Templ]

I prefer to be able to choose the time to be interrupted. I monitor a dozen or so forums and it takes ten minutes or so to check them twice daily. I would NOT have been happy if I my mailbox had been bombarded by the 350 or so messages that have appeared here in the past few weeks.

This must be a misunderstanding.
You are not interrupted in any way by using a usenent news reader. The postings don't appear in your inbox.
They are displayed in a separate area and, depending on your settings, it is automatically shown if there is something new or not.
You can read them at any time you choose.
So it is similar to the current mailing list in terms of notification convenience but less disruptive.
For the long term I see this proposal as a service to the community because in the past there have been long time spans
without any postings on the mailing list. So checking a forum daily just to find out that there is nothing new is
a waste of time and would keep me away from this forum.
By the way, in the public section of the forums there have been very few postings so far and most of them are related to
organizational issues that will disappear after the initial settlement phase.
Some of the subforums are still without any posting.