User:Ms7821/Why forums suck
From London Hackspace Wiki
Feature masturbation (see also: Google Wave)
- Wiki/piratepad better for collaboration
- IRC/jabber better for informal chat
- Email better for discussion
- Imgur better for image macros
Maintenance overhead
- Pointless posting encouraged, so more staff needed to keep overview
- Moving threads, keeping OT, managing boards is all overhead
- Involves running your own spam filters
Lack of support
- No widely used, secure, feature-complete software
- Crap search (especially compared to google groups/gmail)
- Most systems don't use hierarchical threading
Doesn't replace email
- If linked to email, why not just use a mailing list manager?
- Otherwise, depends on web access to check it and will die out immediately
- Which boards should people subscribe to?
- Mental overhead/bad pattern fit
- People can't sort forum posts into their own folders or star them
- Forums encourage deletion, of individual threads or entire topics. Email means there's a paper trail.
