Forums: some peo­ple love ‘em, some peo­ple don’t.

The debate — mail­ing list or forum — has come up at one time or another on almost every mail­ing list and/or forum i’ve ever par­tic­i­pated in. Some peo­ple love one, some love the other. Some use both (that group would include me).

In the spirit of diver­sity, the Web Stan­dards Group — tra­di­tion­ally in the mail­ing list camp — have launched a forum for dis­cussing web stan­dards and related issues, in web-based forum for­mat for those who pre­fer that style. The site was launched in Decem­ber, but with the Christmas/New Year/holiday period tra­di­tion­ally let­ting peo­ple switch off their PCs for a while, it’s only now that posts are start­ing to pick up.

Being the Web Stan­dards Group, the stan­dards com­pli­ance of the forum solu­tion was a major con­cern, and so Vanilla was selected. Matt Mag­ain from Site­Point did most of the work get­ting the forum set up and skinned to match the WSG site — and he’s done a great job. I wasn’t too sure about Vanilla as it turns the tra­di­tional forum metaphor a lit­tle on it’s head — no forums per se, but cat­e­gories instead and a very dif­fer­ent nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem from the norm. But over the weeks it has been run­ning I’m slowly get­ting used to it, and while I don’t yet pre­fer it to a more tra­di­tional forum style ala phpBB, I don’t hate it any­more!
Mem­ber­ship of the forum is inde­pen­dent of mail­ing list/WSG mem­ber­ship, so if you’d like to give it a try please pop on in and say hello.