jonandy

Don't get me wrong – I'm not anti-forum, as there are definite benefits in terms of structure, attachments, better searching, archival, etc.

However, the issue I have is that since I monitor so many different mailing lists/forums/etc, it's very hard to keep up, and if I have to navigate to a web site and browse through topics to see what's going on, I end up just not participating.

In contrast, I've been on a few beta lists that are driven by forums, but publish themselves as a mailing list, so that I can subscribe to the particular topics I'm interested in, and have a “feed” that lets me very quickly see if any topics have come up that are relevant to me. Better yet, there's a link to the forum at the bottom of the email, so if there are aspects of the post that don't get distributed in the email version, such as attachments, I can go back to the forum. If it's just a text conversation, I can reply to that email, and it will track the topic and post back into the right forum.

It wasn't perfect, but I think it stands a MUCH better chance of recreating the vibrance we've had on the Softimage mailing list for so long. Not saying SideFX forums aren't vibrant, of course – I have no opinion on that as of yet. What I've seen in the past, though, is that forums can be extremely active, but are biased toward more junior users who have the time for them.

Terrific, thanks!

Does the forum have any interaction with the mailing list, or is it an entirely separate thing?

I hope I'm not missing something really obvious here, but is there any way to make this forum function a bit more like a regular mailing list with email subscriptions to topics, and replies being redirected back to the forums?