Online Discussion Groups

Heh heh. Welcome, though we have a scoshie bit more than 300 members.

gollum,

There are millions of communities that use "mailing lists". Listserv is just a particular list software that is very popular.

You can find mailing lists of various types all over the internet. MSN, Yahoo and Google all allow for a form of mailing list group for example, and they have thousands of them.

Able2Know's creation was inspired by an old MSN usergroup we had.

Todays interactive discussion forums like IPB,vBulletinf forums had the roots in old mailing lists.Todays forums are lot lot more interactive and easy to use.Almost all sites/organizations etc have forums along with them.It is because they are easy to operate and offer a lot more advantage than a plain site.

There are many reasons which make forums indispensible in todays cyberworld.Some of them are

-You can share your ideas and find people who like that who hate that and also people who can add to that idea
-easy way of debating on any matter.You may not see a person at all and still you can debate to the hell with him.Posts are made instantaneous and you may get the reply instantaneous
-get expert help on any matter.With advent of IPB,vBulletin boards,one can find message boards on anything lead by an expert in that field.Thus you can get the info from him and most of the moderators are only happy to entertain one who comes to their boards for help
-make friends,create a community irrespective of anything that seperates humans in the real world.
And you find people on your areas of interest very easly.
-todays forums are the first step to a more interactive internet.Blogs+forums represent a powerful formula.While blogs give emphasis to a person or team forums emphasise on a community.
Most of the companies have forums for communication between the employees.It multiplies the efficiency to a great extend.

These are just some of the points that came to my mind.There are much much more.

I myself moderate a forum on the internet.As the mods here also know,it is a wonderful feeling to lead a community.The forum is at its best when all the members feel that they are part of community.The veterans here know what I mean.They too have spent so many days promoting the forum when it was young.

mods:what is the difference between mailing lists and rss feeds?I came to the internet after the mailing list era was something like over.

I moderate Edit [Moderator]: Website removed .All are welcome to visit and join if you wish.Its a forum on Indian affairs.

Hey I was looking for something like this not sure if it's exactly like this though.

Well said about forums and such. Anyways I was just wondering has anybody heard of communicating to people about specific subject who are online like MSN except for that it's about that specific area of interest and it's not in forum form (forums takes awhile for people to respond and not instant). I was just wondering if anybody knew what type of online communications is that on the internet? A type of IRC?

Oops sorry about that I just found out that IRC is like a live type of chat similar to MSN it's like MSN+forum (specific interest). Thanks. Hmmm.. now I need to find a tutorial somewhere, hopefully I can just pick it up along the way.

hi
irc s are the most primitive of all the chat rooms.They are really cool,but not cool in the moderan sense.If you want to fight or have flame wars,go to an IRC room.You will have a lot of weapons.I'll write on it later.

veterans
plz expalin how ur IRC days were?I have only read about it in hacking tutorials.

Yes I've heard of such things as those commands you can use to tell the bot to do/say something funny or inappropriate.