Re: TECH: Why this low-tech forum?

Gary Shannon wrote:

>One big advantage of the bbs format is that there need
>not be any daily posting limits because your mailbox
>will never get flooded with hundreds of messages on
>topics you're not interested in.  You pick the topics
>you wish to participate in without the overhead of
>downloading the hundreds of others that you are not
>interested in.  This makes the bbs approach much more
>efficient for dial-up users since it doesn't waste so
>much bandwidth of unwanted stuff.
>
>
>
In my (alas, extensive) experience with dial-up, waiting for a large
amount of data to download, and then browsing it offline at your leisure,
is a much more pleasant experience than downloading a small amount of
data by tediously sorting through it online, with all the attendant
aggravating
points and clicks and waiting for a response from a narrow-bandwidth,
high-latency connection. I'd contend that it's much more efficient to avoid
sorting and browsing via a slow connection at all.

To be honest, browsing a large forum even via broadband is agonising.
I'd rather work through it with my own tools, on my own computer,
thank you very much [see parallel rant on same subject :)].

s.

----
Stephen Mulraney        ataltane@ataltane.net        http://ataltane.net
In 1869 the waffle iron was invented for people who had wrinkled waffles.