| Subject: Re: By the way, it's official: UIUC Newsgroups getting cancelled |
Author:
Dena
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Date Posted: 15:17:44 05/12/03 Mon
In reply to:
Daniel
's message, "Re: By the way, it's official: UIUC Newsgroups getting cancelled" on 14:52:49 05/12/03 Mon
>I still suggest another interface then this. There are
>plenty of other forum hosting interfaces on the web
>that would require login information, but would be a
>lot quicker and more personal.
>
>-Daniel
Here's my reasoning:
1) It's free
2) It DOESN'T generate pop-up ads like most of the other free forums I've seen
3) It DOESN'T interrupt your access to pages with eight to ten sizable ad downloads displayed on every message and/or force you to click through ads, unlike Yahoo Groups
4) It's table-based rather than CSS or DIV-based, which means it's accessible through a text-only browser
5) It's very very low on graphics, which means it's accessible over a 28.8 modem connection
6) It handles threading much more visibly and scannably than the various PHPbb forums out there (you can only skim for the latest message in a thread in those; here you can see exactly how far the conversation has gone)
7) It does NOT permit auto-imbedding of avatars and sig files, which is important to keep it low on graphics and therefore modem-accessible
and, finally,
8) I spent about 16 hours searching the available options about a year ago and decided this was the best option I could find.
Since then, we've gotten a lot of use out of it -- more than we did out of the news groups, in fact; we never had more than 300 messages in 6 months there (their default cleanout rate), whereas I believe we keep 1000 messages in our four archives here and the fourth page of the archive contains messages significantly less than six months old.
If you want me to consider an alternative, find a place that meets the stated criteria above and post a link to it here.
But I didn't just pick the first freeware site I spotted; I worked on choosing this one. We had a discussion involving various hallucinogenic substances and neck-licking pigeons about the options available several months ago, and the final vote then came down on the side of turning off the message preview, but no one was particularly vocal about wanting a different board (or at least didn't present an alternative).
More than one person is going to have to complain about it, and I need to be presented with an alternative I judge worth the effort, in order to go to the trouble of changing it over and getting everyone to move yet again.
Unless someone else particularly wants to take over the JAC webmaster job, that is... do I hear you volunteering? ^_~
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