North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Road's End Farm <organic87@frontiernet.net>]

On Feb 14, 2008, at 10:57 AM, Scott Smith wrote:

> 3) This mailing list needs to be upgraded to a more modern bboard.   
> Bboards can be designed with low overhead so modem users don't get  
> frustrated.

I find it much easier and faster to post on an email list than on a board. I can work in my own choice of email program, set up the way I'm used to using it; save email drafts the way I'm used to doing it, etc. I don't have to mess around trying to figure out how the particular board works. If the post doesn't go through for some reason on an email list, it's right there in my sent box waiting to edit or resend as is. If one doesn't post for whatever reason on a board I post on, if I haven't saved it to another program it's likely to disappear entirely, leaving me all that typing to do over again. And I don't have to log in to post on an email list, let alone log in repeatedly because for unclear reasons the board decides I'm not logged in after all when I try to actually post even though I had just logged in to bring up the page to draft the post on; I just register once and I'm done with it.

I lurk much more on boards than post because of the extra layer of nuisance.

So I guess we get frustrated by different things. I know formatting often doesn't come through an email list correctly, because of people using different email programs. But I don't want to read a lot of fancy formatting and watch a lot of moving icons anyway, I think they're a distracting nuisance. I usually just want to see the text. When pictures or charts are genuinely useful to the discussion people can always post a link to them, which is much easier for the modem people to deal with anyway. (The NAFEX web site could be set up to make this easy to do there, for those who don't already have a site. Maybe it already is, I don't know.)

--Rivka
Finger Lakes NY; zone 5 mostly