In a recent discussion about A room for CPAN Modules discussion? and in this thread on London.pm about CPAN::Forum (maintained by me) - to my understanding - one of the key issues that came up was that people rather use mailing lists than web forums.

I think they are right, I also usually prefer to write e-mails, I can do that off-line, I don't need to regulary visit a site as I am receiving the messages in my in-box etc.

Still for some reason The Monastery is a success. Maybe not everyone likes the push-like technology of mailing lists and preferes a web forum where she can decide when to visit and what to explore. So it might make a good thread asking

Why is the Monastery successful ?

I think that one of the reasons PHP has significantly more users in the web development area is that they understand the web better than we, Perl developers do. (Well, probably it is both reason and result)
As an example, pointed out by many people before me PHP.net has all the PHP documentation on-line with user contributed comments. This is much better - or it is preceived by many as much better than what we have in Perl. One day, I hope someone will create such a site (maybe www.perldoc.com will be extended to do that). In some way I hope that CPAN::Forum will serve that need for CPAN modules.

Of course PHP was designed for Web development. It was designed as a Perl, restricted to Web development so it is not surprising they undertand that stuff better than we do.
They also have rather limited tools in other - non web related - areas. To be fair people developing non-web related stuff in Perl do not really need to understand or use the web. But it might help.

So while I am not sure if this is a meditation or that I am Seeking your Wisdom I'd like to read more about

Which one is better for many to many communication?

Thinking again about this it is quite likely that on the London.pm mailing list more people will prefer mailing lists while in the Monastery more people will prefer web forums so as I am looking for reinfocing my feeling that Perl needs more web forums it is a better idea to post it here rather than on a mailing list <smile>

In reply to Web forum or mailing list ? by szabgab

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