Hello,
Being used to a forum, I find that a mailing-list
is a poor and unattractive way, if not a frustrating way, to communicate. One
can post only text, no graphics. Yet sometimes graphics can be very useful (for
screenshots or concepts, for example).
Moreover, the Ocaml community is split de facto by
the mailing-list system and the different sources that spread in different
places. Many beginners won't bother posting in this mailing-list because it is
mainly used by advanced users. So one has had to create another
place for beginners, Yahoo Ocaml_beginners. This obliges me, for
instance, to set up an account on this list AND on Yahoo, not mentioning
fr.comp.lang.caml and comp.lang.ml newsgroups.
Not only this is unconvenient, it multiplies the
chances of being spammed.
Why not create a real forum dedicated to Ocaml
development with a framework like phpBB (under GPL), for example ? It would
gather all the Caml users in a single place, which would make the Caml
community stronger, more active and therefore more attractive.
A forum like phpBB allows many more ways of
communicating than a simple mailing-list :
- one can create an
unlimited number of parallel forums (one for the advanced users
of this mailing-list , one for the beginners, several for projects, for
example).
Access can be controlled.
Forums can be moderated or not.
Posts can be categorized in predefined
topics
- one can create groups of users, with or
without access control.
- one can do all sorts of searches, full-text, or
any combination of author, date, forum, topic, etc.
- customized look and feel.
phpBB includes chat rooms, for discussing
technical matters in real time.
Good examples of what can be done with the
phpBB forum is here :
- a large french home-cinema and hi-fi forum
with over 15,000 members and 790,000 messages, which makes this place the
single most important source of information on this topic in France. Because it
is comprehensive and active, it attracts professionnals as well as the
large public, and it is read on a regular basis by consumer
electronics journalists : http://www.homecinema-fr.com/forum/