Re: A proposal to bring together the conlang communities

Sai Emrys wrote:
> What I would like to see is for these communities to come together
> into basically one central, multifaceted site - keep the diversity of
> list / BB / wiki / IRC / media / IRL formats perhaps if necessary
> (though I'm unconvinced that the list/BB split is really necessary),
> but make it all coherent, in the same place, and serving the needs of
> all the community rather than having each subgroup split off because
> some (valid and meetable) need isn't handled.
I've always favored mailing lists and newsgroups for discussion, but I
can see the potential benefits of a web-based site. For one thing, it's
easier to find web forums. For another, a forum can be organized by
topic into subforums. That should be enough to keep auxlang topics
separate from artlang and engelang topics. A Unicode-friendly site would
be essential, but once it's set up, the problems we still have with
character encodings on the mailing list would go away. (A web site might
end up with its own set of Unicode problems, on the other hand.)

The thing is, it's so easy to follow discussions in mailing lists and
newsgroups. Spacebar, spacebar, spacebar. I haven't seen a web forum
that doesn't have an awkward interface with long load times between
pages. So it has drawbacks, but there are also potential benefits.

It would also be convenient to have a place for discussion of
concultures and world-building alongside the conlanging forums. The
conculture Yahoogroup exists, but it's mainly dominated by alternative
history scenarios, and it's a Yahoogroup. The world doesn't need any
more Yahoogroups.

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