Quote Originally Posted by EmbranceII
Like SMF. This phpBB kinda sucks.
My #1 complaint about web forums, like the software used here is that it has no sub-threads. So after about 5 posts when people begin to answer to other peoples posts it becomes a complete mess of keeping track of these conversations. All in all web forums are awfull once there is more than 10-15 posts in a thread.

One of the best web forums I have used is digg.com, it has sub threads, but still limit how you can place your answer on sub threads.

Compare that to newsgroups where there is no problem having discussions with 300+ posts, because threading has worked since dawn of times (more than 15 years ago).

Problem #2 is to read answers to an ongoing discussion that may run over a couple of days. The problem is that there is no sort of colouring indicating which posts you have already read and which are new.

News reader software have no problem of keeping track of your reading marking posts as read.

Problem #3 longer discussion are split over multiple web pages, so you do not load the whole discussion in one simple action. This is not a big problem if you have a fixed Internet connection, but it is a problem if you have dail-up where you pay per minute. I do no longer have dial-up, but more people than you think still have to survive on this.

One particular bad implementation is on SlashDot. If an on-going discussion have ca. 75 posts, you only see the first 50. By the time you have read these and change to next page more posts have been inserted, and the top of second page is not the continuation of the first page you just read. The second page start somewhere in the middle of what used to be your first page.

News reader software have no problem downloading 100's to your harddisk for off-line reading.

Good point about web forums: PGD web forum can send an email when answers arrive in the thread. Good for forums on low traffic sites.

Overall I think web forums are wastly inferiour to news groups.

However for the low traffic forums of PGD there is little advantage to spend time and effort on changing web forum setups. It is far more importing that PGD spend their effort on things like the ongoing competition, writing articles and organising info that can be of interest for Pascal programmers.

Doei RIF