Email Lists and Forums
Both email lists and web forums provide for exchanges and collaboration among people who belong to a particular organization. The features of lists and forums differ. Some people prefer one over the other. STC uses both, email lists for exchanges in SIGs, chapters, and committees and the STC Forum for exchanges among all members and collaboration across groups.
What is an email list?
An email list is a set of email addresses to which a special web server, called a list server, sends every message posted by any subscriber to that email list to all of the other subscribers.
An email announcement list is used by a limited number of subscribers to send informative messages to the other subscribers.
An email discussion list allows all subscribers to send messages back and forth to each other, to discuss a particular topic. An email discussion list is often referred to as a "forum" for subscribers to talk about a particular topic area. Each topic discussed is often called a "thread."
Email lists offer subscription options including a digest, one message per day containing all the messages, and a "no mail" setting. Subscribers who elect to receive no email must visit the list website, log in, and read the messages over the web. The list website also allows subscribers to change their list settings.
Email lists have archives on the web. These may or may not be visible to non-subscribers. Typically they are searchable, at least by subscribers using email commands to the list server. Archives that are on the web are also crawled by search engine robots, and results from the archives show up in web searches.
Typically the names and email addresses of list subscribers are not visible on the web. The STC Lyris email lists are hidden. Neither the subscribers nor the messages are visible on the web.
Email lists are relatively old technology, and many list servers have no capability to handle formatted email, such as the messages sent by default from MS Outlook and from many web mail services. List servers often render the HTML tags in such messages in the digest version of the list, and in the list interface itself. List servers tend to be slow, so reading the messages on line can be time-consuming or impossible over a dial up connection.
What is a web forum?
A web forum is a special type of dynamic website that allows registrants to post a topic, thus starting a topic thread, and to post a reply to any existing thread.
A web forum may be divided into any number of categories, each having any number of subject area forums within.
A forum allows registrants to post formatted messages using the syntax allowed by the forum software. The text is rendered with a pleasing appearance and the tags remain invisible.
All of the posts on a forum are listed on a single web page, the forum home page. All of the posts in a particular forum are also listed on one page. All the posts in a thread are displayed in sequence, typically earliest to latest, on one or more web pages.
The posts on a web forum and the list of registered users with their profiles are typically visible to all visitors to the site and to the search engine robots. Email addresses of registered users are visible only to other registered users. Thus web forums provide a way to develop knowledge within an organization that is shared. Frequent posters can demonstrate expertise. Forums can help attract members, supporters, and customers.
Web forums are in the tradition of internet bulletin boards and are sometimes called discussion boards. Advantages over email lists include the ability to render formatted text properly, easy scanning all topics posted, easy scanning an entire topic thread, and elimination of size limits on posts.
Web forums have a subscription feature, by which registrants can subscribe to an email notification for each new post in a topic. Email digests of the day's forum posts may also be available. The STC Forum has this feature. The digest can be very large.