I guess we have to disagree on this, then. One of my design goals for the application I wrote to create a Web archive/interface for the list was to maintain and even enforce the mailing list ethos. What you are seeing is intentional, and had a reason behind it.
Forums (in my limited experience, tried many, hated all) encourage a sort of “drive-by” engagement by their members, for the most part. It’s more “me-first” rather than “community”, as you dip in, search for something you need an answer to, find it (or not), and then disengage again, rather than keeping your ears open for an opportunity to be helpful to others, just as they are helpful to you. I find more things useful to my own practice through following the list than I spend reading or answering. I filter all incoming *Talk lists into a separate mailbox, on my home computer, and go through them about once a day. Yes, I have seen the same question answered over and over (I’ve been a member of this mailing list since 1997), but I still answer them because I remember what it was to be new to this subject and application. But what I have also seen over and over is that a new crop of people begin to answer these questions before I or another of the “old boys” get to them. I have also had the privilege to see people who asked me a lot of questions begin to become experts in one area or another, and mentor others. Reach one, teach one.
If FreewayTalk were to become a pure “forum”, without any interface to mail, I doubt I would find the time to visit it any more. Mail, pushed to me, in a question/answer format, is just such a natural fit for my style of engagement and memory that I have a hard time fitting into other schemes. And not for a lack of trying, either.
Finally, while I am proud of the technical anti-SPAM treatment that I gave the FreewayTalk Web application, I doubt very much that I am even slightly responsible for the friendly and passionate discussion we see here, almost entirely free from acrimony. There is very little back-room banning that goes on here, maybe one person per calendar quarter. When you belong to a community like FreewayTalk – when you have invested the time that it takes to come up to speed and learn the people and the themes, you tend not to “piss in your own pond”, to use the vernacular. People who drop into a forum for ten seconds at a time tend not to be so restrained by culture or convention, as they (I guess) don’t have that investment or history at stake. (And please, I am not intending to paint you with that brush, only to note my considered opinion and observation of many people in many online communities over the years. Much of this is from reading (other) forum threads that I encountered during Google searches for topics unrelated to Freeway.)
Walter
PS: I have answered many people who asked if they could edit something after they wrote it with the same canned answer (you can’t edit an e-mail after you send it), and I usually leave it at that. But in recent discussions with list member Todd, who is building a tutorial community for Web design and related industries, he asked me some questions that caused me to consider the depths of this topic. I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about this subject lately, as a result, so this lengthy answer is more likely the product of that internal dialogue than your immediate point here. Again, I am taking great effort to point out that this is entirely about what I was thinking of when I wrote the application, and how I approach the list when I interact with it in my painfully Luddite manner. I have 1997 on speed-dial, you don’t need to point out to me that they called!
On Jan 8, 2015, at 11:10 PM, JDW email@hidden wrote:
Well, although I am no stranger to SoftPress email lists, I for one have never treated FreewayTalk as an email list. I have it setup so I get no emails except for those which tell me someone posted in a thread I am subscribed to. My emailbox is filled to the brim as it is, so I would never read FreewayTalk if all the content came to me by email (even DIGEST). When I want to research something or post something about Freeway, I visit “freewaytalk.net” in a web browser. As such, it’s always disappointing to see that this forum is very much still an email list rather than a genuine forum when you can EDIT POSTS and DELETE POST, among many other goodies. (And that remains true even though Walter Davis has done an amazingly good job in transforming a text email list into something nicely accessibly via web browser.) Maybe FreewayTalk can one day take a giant leap forward and become a real post-editable FORUM whenever you folks grow sufficiently weary of the email paradigm.
–James Wages
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