<div class="gmail_quote">On 23 February 2011 17:04, Alexandre Prokoudine <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:alexandre.prokoudine@gmail.com">alexandre.prokoudine@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="im">On 2/23/11, Jan Schrewe wrote:<br>
<br>
> I believe the user experience in a forum is usually bad. There is the<br>
> problem of a bad interface that a user normally can't change.<br>
<br>
</div>Are you referring to some specific forum engines? Some specific forum themes?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Maybe it's just me, but I have yet to stumble upon an engine and/or theme that works. Most of them feel rather clumsy to me and you need way more clicks to get anywhere then with a decent mail program. </div>
<div><br></div><div>The other thing is that search generally sucks in form software. Again, this might be subjective.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="im"><br>
> The other thing about forums is that you have to actively do something to<br>
> follow what's going on (going to a site, hitting reload every couple mnutes<br>
> to see if anything new happened).<br>
<br>
</div>You absolutely don't have to do that. Every decent forum CMS has<br>
thread subscriptions so that you are pinged in the mailbox if<br>
something happens. Some even go as far as providing per-section and<br>
per-thread RSS feeds.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yes, but with RSS you get a timeline of messages and not threads. </div><div><br></div><div>If you get updates via E-Mail, you end up with a mailing list, in which posting is more complicated. Or is it possible to hit just reply and the mail gets posted by the system to the forum?</div>
<div><br></div><div>Per-section and per-thread notifications are fine, but they again involve subscribing and searching actively.</div><div><br></div><div>The other thing is that this is just not the standard way to use a form, so using the forum via mail feels mostly like an afterthought.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Jan</div></div>