Re: CONLANG/ZBB crossover (WAS: CONLANG article deleted from Wikipedia)

On May 8, 2007, at 4:23 AM, taliesin the storyteller wrote:

> * Sai Emrys said on 2007-05-07 23:04:02 +0200
>> On 5/7/07, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
>>>> BB-systems (...) [a]re no substitute for mailing lists or
>>>> newsgroups. Not for regular readers, anyway; they can be
>>>> convenient for casual browsing on certain topics (no need
>>>> for subscription). Newsgroups are better for high-volume
>>>> discussion groups than mailing lists since you can browse
>>>> the headers without downloading all the messages.
>>>
>>> but it would explain why so few conlangers seem to visit
>>> both regularly.
>>
>> So... who's on both? (;-))
>
> I skim ZBB (C&C, L&L and the Museum) but rarely post.
>
> I wish there were archives: there was a very relevant post there
> about mood/modality that I didn't make a local backup of, since
> I assumed there were archives...
So no one's worked out a way to archive it by now, as I was hoping?
I'm thinking maybe a script that users could run whenever they feel
like archiving that would download all messages present at that time.
Would this be hard to do, and would this make BB* administrators or
web hosts angry (e.g. because it would produce a bunch of requests at
once)?

Heh. Two more things no one has mentioned yet in the 'annoyances'
category:

- Graphics and quotes often found in web signatures. Ok, the graphics
are cute sometimes, in moderation. (Actually ZBB doesn't have many
graphics, but lots of other forums do. In their defense, that's often
the whole point of them.) And the quotes... I know people sometimes
have quotations in their signatures on mailing lists, but quite often
those quotations express some sort of perceived wisdom which makes
sense out of context, whereas on ZBB people just quote other posters
completely out of context, when they say especially off-the-wall
things. Also, the way the quotes are formatted sometimes makes them
look like they are actually part of the body of the message, rather
than just the signature.

- The BB software breaks things into consecutive pages, which is a
pain. I know the web isn't designed for pages of indefinite length
(although I can imagine someone implementing something like that,
where the browser would only load new pages when you get close to
scrolling all the way down), and it prevents you from having to
download a really long thread all at once if you're not sure you want
to read it all, but I really hate things being broken up over 40
pages. And the link for each page is a very small target to have to
click.

On the plus side, I like the indentation and boxes drawn around
quoted text. Email clients have an impossible time of doing that,
because there are numerous text signifiers of quotation; also, one of
the most common such signifiers, >, is sometimes used for purposes
other than quoting. E.g. on this list it often happens that someone
writes out a sound change and their decides to wrap the line such
that the > appears at the beginning of the line, making it appear to
receiving clients like a quote.

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