Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] What about a Wireshark forum?

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 23:27:18 -0700

Jeff Sadowski wrote:

I like the idea of a forum. A forum is a much more organized idea and a moderator to remove uneeded profanity. A mailing list is good too and works much the same way a forum does today but I still think nothing beats a good forum with moderation. It seems to me that the majority of the posters against the forum where just profane and had no logical reason for disliking the forum.

From the version of the Oxford English Dictionary bundled with Mac OS X 10.4[.x]:

	profane

	adjective

		...

3 "profane language" obscene, blasphemous, indecent, foul, vulgar, crude, filthy, dirty, smutty, coarse, rude, offensive, indecorous. antonym decorous.

(I assume when you said they were "just profane" you didn't mean "secular, lay, nonreligious, temporal" or "irreverent, irreligious, ungodly, godless, unbelieving, impious, disrespectful, sacrilegious".)

The closest thing to profane language I saw in the thread was one instance of the word "suck" in one message, so I don't think they were "just profane" (so it's not as if their only problem with a moderated forum would be that they couldn't use profane language, but presumably that's not what you were implying).

I think at least some posters against the forum had good reasons for disliking it:

	http://ethereal.com/lists/ethereal-users/200605/msg00195.html

"Not to be a wet blanket for your idea, but there are things that work
well on discussion forums (when people have time to use a browser and
keep checking back or configure it to email them for replies to their
posts). I don't happen to think that a high-volume list is one of them."

Absent some response-notification scheme such as the one Slashdot has, where you get e-mail notifying you that somebody's replied to you, that'd cause a problem for many users - polling a forum can be a pain.

	http://ethereal.com/lists/ethereal-users/200605/msg00200.html

"No, they are not. Get a good mail client. I handle a couple of hundred
mails a day. How I handle that much mail? Well my client supports
sorting, scoring and threading so it's no big problem. If I'm not
interested in a discussion I just press one key and it's marked as
read. If I don't want to read about a specific topic I just hit a couple
of keys and I'll never read it a again. I've never seen this features in
a web based forum."

You can also edit what you typed in a good forum and try to make better before someone reads it.

You can do that before sending a mail message, too. Or do you mean you can *retroactively* edit one of your postings?