DON'T REPLY TO THE LIST:

As I mentioned in Sydney, we have now established an instance of the vBulletin web-based forum software (see www.vbulletin.com) and are prepared to host a forum here for the current discussions if there is any desire to do so.

Forums provide better threading than email (it is not based solely on the Subject field) and also permit participants to consider things somwhat more at their own schedule and according to their own interests. The board administrators can set how long postings remain at the forefront, so that it is easier to understand what is current. vBulletin allows you to be notified briefly by mail when something of interest appeared on the forum.

There are a few disadvantages to moving this discussion now: (a)Quite a bit has transpired and people might feel they need to restate things in the forum [that could be an advantage....]; (b)we are new to this software and might not administer it as seamlessly as a mail-based system.

So as not to clutter the list. I would urge people to /privately/ reply to me with their sympathy for or against the issue. I'll summarize and post the results and then people can discuss it, if warranted. Send mail to ram@cs.umb.edu. Your "Reply" facility will likely send to the list.

For a glimpse of how vBulletin forums operate, see those at

http://vbulletin.com/forum/index.php

http://forums.progresstalk.com/index.php http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/ http://www.ntcompatible.com/vb/index.php http://www.webdevforums.com/

As far as I can tell, vBulletin is the software under the forum parts of sourceforge.net

Bob Morris

p.s.

Forum software is aimed at community building, so vBuilder has lots of flashy features like smiley face annotations, personal avatars, polls about the quality of a thread, "buddy lists", etc. I don't expect that SDD forums would operate with that stuff in your face, especially as we gain administrative experience.