[BlueOnyx:01854] Re: Un-subscriptions...?

[Ralf Quint]

At 10:00 AM 7/27/2009, Michael Stauber wrote:
>Hi Jeff,
>
>I fully agree with Gerald: A forum is a time waster. With a mailing list you
>just glance into the folder in your email client and only see the 
>new messages
>sticking out. With one glance you can usually determine if it's an item of
>interest or not.
>
>With a forum it takes much more time as you constantly have to 
>juggle back and
>forth, going to the forum index, clicking on the topic that has new replies,
>skipping the messages you've already seen and then going back to the index to
>find the next new message. That's not really productive.

Well, looks like you haven't used any forum lately? <LOL>

I thought similar a few years back when we only had a mailing list 
for the Smoothwall firewall project. In '03, a forum, based on phpBB, 
was introduced and within a matter of weeks, the mailing list became obsolete.

The advantages of a forum are
-that you can have a subforum for all the different issues, like 
install, email, php, add-ons, etc, making it easy for people to 
concentrate only on the topics they are interested in
- you can access the forum from everywhere where you have Internet 
access, not only where you have your email client running

The main disadvantage is that you have a bit more of administrative 
duties than with a mailing list...

>As for membership levels: We have +300 subscribers to the list at the moment
>and like on any list we have the usual spread between active and passive
>participants. The few unsubscribe requests we've had are not an indicator
>about a lack of interest in BlueOnyx.

The two unsubscribe messages recently were from one and the same 
person, who didn't get the hint on how to unsubscribe he got after 
the first time. And certainly not more annoying than those "out of 
office" messages that are showing up once in a while...

Ralf