Module 2: Email Lists (1)

What are the pros and cons of email lists versus discussion boards?

I can speak about this topic from experience. As a keen inline skater who met friends in the city to skate once a week, I joined a yahoo groups email list. There were pros and cons of being part of this list. From an organisational point of view it was great, everyone would know the exact time and place to meet, who would be there, and how long we would skate for. It was also good because people would bring along cameras and the next day at work, you would be able check out the shots taken from the night before.

On the downside though, there would be times during the day when practically everyone would be online at once, and it seemed that you were getting bombarded with emails. This was actually quite distracting if you at work.

There was also the issue of receiving mail from people I had never heard of, but were connected in some way to the skating group. Probably about 80% of the mail I received was irrelevent to me or I had no interest in whatsoever. The other 20% of mail was great and worthwhile.

With this volume of mail coming in everyday though it also meant setting aside time to go through and sorting it out. Deleting most of the messages, and filing the rest away.

After about six months of being in the list though, I had my name removed. In the end I found the volume of mail I was receiving to be far too distracting.

Discussion boards are not as obtrusive. You are able to choose whether or not you want to add a comment to a thread, or even if you want to read a thread for thar matter. With a disscusion board you can choose to be invisible, simply by reading relevant information and delibrately not adding to it.