[APD] Time to move on?

[Stuart Halliday <stuart at mytriops_com>]

I believe Pete wrote this email section below:
> I think lots of folks have moved on to the web sites for info and
> discussions.

Very true.

In the beginning we used mailing lists to discuss issues and problems.
Nowadays people coming onto the Internet tend to use the Web browser as 
their first tool of choice to find out things and of course come across 
these web forums, phpbbs, etc.

These are prettier to look upon than the ap archives and perhaps more 
index-able via Google?

 From a technical point these forums are 'expensive' for people to view, you 
need a fast Internet connection.
You need to download massive amount of bytes (pretty pictures, avatars, 
icons) just to read a couple of lines of text.
So their text to noise ratio is extremly high.
(Not very green actually.)
Plus of course they cost more money to run than a mailing list.

As I'm from the old IT world when a 4K bytes was a *lot* of text these sites 
are very wasteful.

Other problems they have:
You need broadband to view them quickly, they're are high targets for 
spammers and hackers.
These sites have so many filtering systems to stop people messing them up so 
that they are quite high maintainance. Plus they're not easily archived like 
email is.

I prefer good old fashion mailing lists. But forums are prettier and seem to 
be the tool of choice for the younger age group regardless of my view.

Maybe time to think about moving to a Forum based web system if all the 
young aquarists are there?

-- 
Stuart Halliday
http://mytriops.com/
200 Million years in the making...
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