creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)

Every browser-based interface I've ever seen has a number of features that
I find to be huge deterrents. To mention just two:

- They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things such as
"votes", the number of views, the elapsed time since something or other
happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh, and advertisements. The
Mathematica stackexchange example given in a link in one of the emails
below (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these
shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example.

- In most if not all cases, one has to login before posting. I have too
many usernames and passwords as it is.

Right now, at this very moment, in my email client's window I can see and
browse the subject lines of 20 threads in r-help. And that's using only
about half of my screens vertical space. In contrast, in the Mathematica
stackexchange example, I can see at most 10, and that only by using the
entire vertical space of my screen. The "From" column in my email client
shows the names of several of the people contributing to the thread, which
the browser interface does not. In the email client, I can move through
messages, and between messages in a thread using my keyboard. In a
browser, I have to do lots of mousing and clicking, which is much less
efficient.

As it is now, r-help messages come to me. I don't have to start up a
browser. So it's much easier to go take a quick look at what's new at any
time. 

True, I had to subscribe to the mailing list, which involves a username
and password. But once it's done, it's done. I don't have to login before
posting, which means I don't have to remember yet another username and
password.

What "...duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists)"? I have
no duplicated effort...in fact, I have almost no effort at all, since the
messages come to me. There was some initial setup, i.e., to filter
different r-* messages to different mailboxes in my email client, but now
that that's done, it's as simple as clicking on the correct mailbox.

In other words, in every way that's important to me, the mailing list
approach is superior. I do not support abandoning the mailing list system
for any alternative.

-Don

creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ? (was: Re: Should there be an R-beginners list?)

Thread (16 messages)