On Wed, May 10, 2000 at 06:38:16PM +0000, Derek Balling wrote:
> Message boards are inherently easier for some people to use, mailing lists

Actually it's not so much versatility as convenience. Logging into a BBS to
read discussions and waiting a second or more for each message is very
unconvenient for me. Doing this in my mailbox is way faster.

> Mailing lists, because they don't show immediate results in real-time (and
> you don't have a sense that "this message has already been replied to"

That's true, but in all fairness, most mailing lists don't have much
lag.
Did you use dialup BBSes?
Did you stay online while you were reading messages and answering them or
did you use an offline reader?
There was a day of lag or more with dialup BBSes, and people used offline
readers, and yet it worked better for most this way.

> Here's hoping the BBS stays just the way it is... albeit with more users. :-)

Well, you know what I'm hoping :-)

It's too bad that I can't feed the messages posted on the mailing list back
to the BBS because as the list membership grows, we'll have more posts to
the lists that the BBS users will never see.
If someone has a suggestion on how to make this work, I'm all ears (but no,
I'm not writing hundred of lines of code to log into the BBS with http
requests and simulate a post for each mailing list user :-D)

Marc
--

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