On Mar 8, 2008, at 10:04 AM, David Artman wrote:
Yes, you can set a Google Group to behave like a normal mailing
list...
And I realize some confusion, here: I and other haves conflated
groupware with web forums.
[insert suitable expletive here]
I feel like channeling Emily Latella here. "Oh. That's very
different. Never mind."
As I watched things develop at the time, Yahoo Groups began as
mailing lists, with the ability to archive and read (and respond to)
them using web browsers. The Yahoo function wasn't exactly a clone
of the egroups mailing list service, but it was close. Google Groups
was originally a web-based Usenet interface, with significant
enhancements in the past few years to turn the paradigm around and
make it possible to think of the web application as a primary
interface with email and classic newsgroups as an add-on. It still
works best with the rest of the internet if you treat it as a web
front end to an email- or nntp-based system.
Neither of them is anything like what I imagine most people think of
when they hear the term "web forum". Using the wrong word for a
concept and then berating folks for being wilfully ignorant when they
don't immediately agree with you is not a good way to accomplish
anything (except perhaps to reinforce your reputation as a
malcontent). It's very frustrating to find out that the argument
could have been avoided completely if you had called things by the
proper name. I think it's also worth pointing out that your
description is backwards from the way things developed: such a group
is more of a mailing list with a way to access it via the web, rather
than a web forum with a way to access it via email.
But in the final analysis, I would have no problem if the mailing
lists hosted at lists.looneylabs.com moved somewhere else in order to
provide a web interface for people who prefer to do things that way.