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I've watched the Forum vs. Mailing list debate with a measure of ambivalence, thinking I don't mind it either way.

Having negotiated the forum now for a bit I have to say I like it, I even like the display style which some contributors questioned.

There are however two glaring faults which I think could be easily fixed to make it a complete functional replacement for the mailing list.

Firstly: My mail messages now only contain the posted message, none of the context, only gaining contextual meaning once the link is clicked. It's completely useless as a text, it could well be replaced with a "There's a new post! - click here." flag.

How about, in the outgoing mail, programmatically including the previous 2 messages in the thread at the least, or perhaps the ellipsed first 500 characters of the previous 5 messages with simple separators (or ellipses between 300 starting+300 ending characters - a quick bit of testing should reveal a good format). Both these would solve the issue (or perhaps other solutions I haven't even thought about).

Secondly, frustratingly I am all for freedom and allowing anonymous posting, but it makes it very hard to establish weight to a post. Sometimes I see posted solutions from Anonymous people, which may or may not be good solutions, but now I have to do further reading on the matter... whereas if I knew it was from Keith or Igor or James or... or... I could immediately 5-star that content in my mind and use it or move on. The opposite is also true.

From a poster's perspective, it's also hard to notice when you open the site if you are in anonymous mode or not, so I could easily post as anonymous, perhaps making people think my post has more value than it actually deserves or robbing them of the ability to simply click past my post when they already know they don't like what I say (or the length with which I say it). It would be nice if the site reminded me "You need to log in to post".

Can we please not have anonymous posting? It's not like we vet a poster's heritage... a simple incognito but perpetually recognizable handle would do.


With these fixed, I would stop missing the mailing list so dearly.
Thanks.