Patagon--
While it may be true that most people who have e-mail also have access to the Web, that does not mean they use it, or are comfortable with it.
Add to the additional skills (over e-mail) required to use a browser the level of effort to understand words on a forum like "index" and "submit" and "continue" and figuring out where to click to even read a message (not difficult for you and me, but it is for a person new to it), and you put some barriers up for people.
The easier you can make it for some, the easier it will be for most.
It is our job to encourage people to take part, and figure a way to do that which allows them the most choices, even if it makes the work harder for us. Or so I think today.

:-Doug.
Doug@FootprintsintheWind.com
<a target="_blank" href=http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com>www.FootprintsintheWind.com</a>

dgermann

I see your point...However I guess I have a different opinion. This is where I would like to hear other people's opinion as well, because I agree basically with you (trying to make the forum more popular, easier to use, etc) and how to achieve that is probably an important discussion, where I'm open to other points of view.

I agree that there are some skills to learn to use a forum (many skills actually; because most people here are experienced users, it's easy to overlook the problems of non-skilled users). However I believe email posting may be more confussing than helpful :

The new users (at least the one that I know) are more skilled on the web and know very little about their mail programs. They also seem to be willing to learn (and therefore more succesful at) how to use a website. I guess there is some logic behind this, most people will use that skills all over the web, not only at your site. The truth is, if they want to use the forum they will have to learn how. While we can, and should, do as much as possible to make that as easy as possible, they wont have a pleasnt experience with it unless they learn these skills.

My other concern is that these people posting by mail will not be able to really follow the discussions, and therefore wont be able to really interact with the community (but I may be missing how this thing would work). I also would like to encourage people to come to the forum (learning the skills) and use the other community building features (PM for example or something entirely differnent at my site). That's what I always thought but I am open to other arguments proving em wrong...

I like the idea and all.. But seriously.. If it's that big of a problem then you should get a mailing list and have the forum on the side for now.

I've never seen a community where people were too lazy to even open their browser, but I suppose they do exist. You should consider setting up a mailing list.

I do think it would be a neat feature to post by sending an email, but then how would that work? You would have to have a seperate email address to send messages to so that you can post to specific forums?! Otherwise how do you make a post to 1 forum when you have 30 of them? etc etc..

I personally think screams time would be better spent writing other features. This one seems like it could be way too complex. He could pump out a lot of cool features in the time it would take him to do this one.

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Jeremy 'PeelBoy' Amberg

I agree. You read my mind.

Besides adding a feature like this would turn this forum into it's 'own' crap mailing list software with NEAT archive/back end instead of the other way around lol..

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Jeremy 'PeelBoy' Amberg

Right, but there is a very small percentage of people like this. Even my GF who owns a Web TV for only the past month or two (and has never used a computer or the internet otherwise) was able to figure out my forum on her own..

If a large percentage of your users don't understand how to use the forum or they are too lazy or too busy then ditch it and get a mailing list. A good one will archive all of the messages sent and make it searchable etc.. That is probably all you need.

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Jeremy 'PeelBoy' Amberg

Making the forum easier by changing the user interface is one thing.

Making the forum easier by saying "screw it let's just use an email interface" is the wrong way to do it.

When you first look at it you'll think it's an easy out, but start thinking about it from a code stand point? It's NOT an easy task to do it properly at all!!!!

Scream's time will be better spent finding somebody to make new, better GFX and designing an easier to use interface for the forum (although it would be hard to get too much easier)

The new version of VBulletin just passed us up in the features catagory. It's easier to use, looks nicer, more features etc.. But it's slow and not threaded so I still like this software better.

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Jeremy 'PeelBoy' Amberg

by making it easier for users to post on your forum is the absolute goal. saying if they can't post they shouldnt post in the first place, is the wrong way to think about it. email is a valuable tool to use in a board. it won't turn your board into a mailing list, it will just give an option to the user/users to post/reply by email. this option in my eyes is soo really cool.
i heard some of my friends complaining that when there users post gets replied to they just push reply on the email and send the message that way. if you could just push reply in yoru email and press send, the message gets posted and you don't have to open up your netscape. that rocks.
again , most people won't be able to use this option cause you would have to forward your mail to a script, and not many hosts allow that.
i would love to do something like this to work with phpnuke, to post articles by mail.

<font color=red>--------------</font color=red>

<a target="_blank" href=http://extremeforums.org>http://extremeforums.org</a>

If we take a look at the many things that could improve this software, I guess making the interface more user friendly and other features would be on top of the list. This feature (and also many of the features I suggested and really would like to see) will be IMO near the bottom. Of course how many people think it's useful has an influence on that list too, I guess.

For making it easier to non-skilled users, I agree...but the bottom line IMO is that if you can't get them to really involve in teh forum (and therefore learn) you won't really get them...they may post by email (for example) sometimes, but only those users willing to learn to use the software will stay, so focusing on those other users is a waste of time (when you can use that time to make everything easier and better for those really important users that will stay with you).

Maybe someone should consider making this feature as a plugin, some people seem to be really interested on this one, and maybe the others are converted once we see it....

My 2 cents,
While I think linking W3T to an email system that would allow users to post to forums via email would be a nice addition, I don't think it is a priority. I agree that making it easier for users to participate in discussion forums is very important. I think that a good step forward with regards to email intergration that would make forum use easier for the user and also encourage users to return could focus on the email subscriptions tool. I think this is a great tool, as it really incourages users to come back and visit the forum and participate. I would like to see this polished up a bit, making it a bit more fool proof. Some suggestions:
-the option to subscribe to a forum could be listed as a button on each individual forum for registered users. As it stnds now, I find the subscriptions option hidden, not as accessible as I think it should be.
-The generated emails for each forum could list emails in a more readable sequence. As opposed to posts to the forum by date, have them displayed in accordance to threads on the forum. As it stands now, I find it a bit confusing when I get the daily posts for a forum, not 100% sure how the conversation threads come together. Perhaps forum posts could be organized under seperate headers of the thread title.
-Each individual forum post pulled together in an email daily posts could include a reference to what post it is in reply to. Also a link to that specific post could be included on top of the general link to to forum that is included at the top of the email. eg:
Subject: Re: Make it easier to build community, please

In Reply to: Subject by Poster

Poster: patagon

Posted on: 03/15/01 11:44 AM

Link: http://www.whatever.org/wwwthreads.php?to=specificpost....
Perhaps the daily emails should also include a line mentioning that in order to reply to a particular post, s/he has to click on the link that corresponds to the post.
One other thing that I think could use some polishing with the email subscriptions is tags. One can turn tags (markup or HTML) on and off in generated emails. This is great. I personlly think that the emails are much more legible with the tags turned off, but some important information gets lost. Links to other documents are junked when the tags are removed. Ideally I would like to see links remain intact, but the surrounding tags nuked.
1 up from this would translate the daily emails into HTML legible emails (my email reader reads them as plain text), that also includes a plain text version that defaults to this for plain text email clients (pine).
I am confident that a more polished email subscription system will lend greatly to the building of online community
-e

Personally, I'd rather we see more concrete features added to the script long before this "post by mail" option be seriously considered. While I believe it would be a useful option in a workgroup environment, it alone would not add much in the way of "community building". Mailing lists are great for some people because it is true, you can send/receive messages very easily, it does help people communicate and come together – to a certain extent. But we're talking about forums here. Not a mailing list.

There are a great number of much more useful features that have been requested in this forum that I’d rather see added to the script than this option. I’ll not debate the usefulness of this particular feature in detail only because I do not have the time to give the argument the time it would deserve. I’m just voicing my vote for a “wait and see” approach to this while other key features take precedence.

Jhariden (aka Strategist)
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