Date   : Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:10:47 -0500
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Retro Software site launch

Sprow wrote:
> In article <c9ae1fc80803270716o31615509wc5172c44960011a3@...>,
>    samwise <samwise@...> wrote:
>>> How do I get posts to the forum to come to my email inbox, and how
>>>  do I post to the forum via email?
>> Is web access a real problem for you?  I believe Firefox is freely
>> available for Risc OS and would allow you to post to the forum over
>> the web and
> 
> I suspect it's not the web access that's the hard part, it's that if I'm
> interested in say 30 different subjects I'd have to go and log in to all 30
> forums (apologies to any Latin scholars) to see what'd changed.

Also with web forums you're pretty much at the mercy of the site designer as 
to the UI presented - and a lot of them are pretty dire (heck, many don't even 
handle basic message threading).

Not to mention that, despite it being the dissemination of information that's 
most important on any 'discussion' site, most of them seem to be littered with 
all sorts of graphical frills (emoticons, avatars, general site 'branding') 
that just distract the user from the raw data.

Plus having all the data 'remote', and buried within a pile of HTML, can make 
it very hard to carry out any useful local archival of the information. Sure, 
web search engines can go some way to providing a useful search service - but 
only so long as the website in question is still 'alive'.

> With an email interface it all gets delivered at my door to digest at
> leisure,

Yep. Although personally NNTP works just as well; both mechanisms are more 
about transfer of raw information than a web-based interface/protocol is.

cheers

Jules