CCP4bb Should Become a Forum
The CCP4bb is the most popular electronic mailing list that is related to macromolecular crystallography. The idea would go even further and bring together all bulletin boards (such as Phenix, Coot, PyMol) into one location. This would benefit developers and users in that they would only need to check one location to ask and answer questions.
It is time to move on when:
1) Members have a drawn out (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here) discussion on attachment size and html formatting in emails which is fine.
Does everyone need to receive each of these emails? No.
Both problems would be fixed by using a forum instead of an email based system.
2) Members are being used as targets for scams (yeah, I don’t know who falls for these either).
3) Have your work email address spammed due to being on the bulletin board.
4) You would not have to depend on others to summarize answers to the question they asked. This would not only save time of those asking questions, but allow others to have access to all the answers.
5) A forum could be organized by topic instead of the entire list receiving every email.
Members of the email bulletin board have already expressed their dissatisfaction in receiving every email.
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What would the topics look like for this new forum?
Protein Cloning, Expression and Purification
Protein Crystallization
Data Collection
Data Processing
Data Refinement
Program Installation Problems
Program Execution Problems
Employment
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The topics will need to be adjusted. It won’t be perfect at first, but will be much, much better.
It is time to make an old system fit the next generation.
Please drop me a line in the comments on what you think about this and if you would join.
matt
January 4th, 2010 at 8:31 AM #
… if you build it,
they will come …
wlad
January 4th, 2010 at 11:26 AM #
i would be very interested to see if the CCP4 bulletin board could be successfully transitioned into a friendfeed room…
Nate
January 4th, 2010 at 1:15 PM #
Be the change you wish to see in the world etc etc
You seem to have a fairly comprehensive grasp on the state of communication as it is currently spread out. If you set up a system that addresses the problems you just outlined I’m sure it would prove more popular than the current mishmash.
Sili
January 4th, 2010 at 4:11 PM #
Hear, hear!
Oliver Clarke
January 4th, 2010 at 5:32 PM #
Completeley agree, a forum would be vastly more user-friendly. Having a decent search function would also be a great improvement.
Dima
January 4th, 2010 at 6:09 PM #
What’s there to built?
Usenet newsgroups bionet.xtallography and sci.techniques.xtallography existed for years! Usenet/newsreader format is 1000,000X more convenient, user friendly and logical than any of the WWW “forums” with their clunky semi-usable interfaces.
The only trouble is that, somehow, using a software tool that is not a browser or an email client seems to be beyond abilities of crystallographers worldwide.
Eric Williams
January 4th, 2010 at 9:35 PM #
Usenet?! Give me a break. Why don’t we ditch Twitter for IRC while we’re at it.
Brett Collins
January 5th, 2010 at 1:35 AM #
I like the idea in principle. But… I’m possibly a bit of a luddite but one concern I have is many people wouldn’t bother reading it. I know I wouldn’t respond to questions unless they were in my email inbox. And I get the feeling that the prompt responses I’ve had in the past to my own questions wouldn’t have been answered nearly as efficiently. I could be wrong.
John Warren
January 5th, 2010 at 7:23 AM #
I’d be happy to add a dedicated area to my existing X-ray Crystallography forum (we also let neutron users take part if they wish) which would be just CCP4. It could have as many subforums as required and I’m sure there would be an ability for cross posting into the more general crystallography areas as well. Full control would be granted to the CCP4 moderators etc, etc, and so forth, etc.
The existing forum posts to twitter has atom/rss feeds for all areas and opt-in/out mailing per area even down to per post. Come see for yourself http://www.xrayforum.co.uk
Dima
January 5th, 2010 at 10:12 AM #
Twitter is newer and sounds better than IRC, right? It also is a lot less functional, making it a clear winner these days. Yep.
sean
January 6th, 2010 at 3:36 AM #
What about a google wave?
Len
January 6th, 2010 at 9:46 AM #
Actually if twitter disappeared I would not mind. There is more junk coming from twitter then ever now a days.
I liked the usenet forums but find the mail style ccp4bb more useful. A web forum might work though I have to agree immediate feedback would probably disappear and some topics would sit there with no response.
Eric Williams
January 6th, 2010 at 12:37 PM #
Topic-based email lists might be better than a forum. Fast feedback requires push technology, not pull. Most folks are too lazy to pull, i.e., manually check to see if something was updated.
Twitter’s not without flaws, but if the Iran election protesters used IRC, the only people who’d know about it would have been in #iranelection on some dalnet server and the story probably never would have gained worldwide attention. I see Twitter as a cross between IRC and IM. Instead of being static, channels are dynamic. Topic channels are created by hash-tag searches and each person on Twitter has a personal channel.
Eric Williams
January 6th, 2010 at 12:38 PM #
Wave is too experimental, too slow, and too buggy. It hasn’t proven its usefulness yet.
John Warren
January 6th, 2010 at 1:38 PM #
A web forum can automatically email you are to when new posts have been, erm, posted and or your post has been replied. It can also not it is up to the individual. Likewise forums can also stream RSS/atom feeds directly from the posts these can even feed good old twitter (as in the case with my forum). So there are many ways the information can get back to an member without them having to search for it. The main difference is they can not just hit reply in their email but instead need to press a link in an email instead.
Sean
January 7th, 2010 at 5:29 PM #
Thanks everyone for the feedback. It seems like the only concern to moving away from a bb would be the response time, which I don’t think would be an issue if enough people were interested in joining the forum.
Ethan Merritt
January 10th, 2010 at 11:58 PM #
Put me in the old fogie’s “usenet was better” camp. There are still a couple of usenet groups I regularly participate in that have survived the competition with newer but less suitable mechanisms for discussion, dispersion, and topic-based search. But the writing is on the wall and the wall has mostly been torn down. So…
I think Email distribution (”push” technology if you insist) is better for this than a web site of any sort. You see the ebb and flow of discussion on topics you would otherwise not bother to pull up and follow. Who knows? There could be a gem in there that will benefit your own research. Conversely, some topic may come up in passing that you can contribute to. I know that I, for one, am more likely to add my 2 cents as part of an on-going conversation, be it a mailing list or a usenet thread, than to tack it on as an addendum to something posted on a web forum days or years before I noticed it.
Eric Williams
January 11th, 2010 at 7:10 AM #
Email also works well when you have the massive storage and slick archiving of Gmail.
Matt Harrington
January 20th, 2010 at 4:02 PM #
Coincidentally, I’m actually working on this. Stay tuned…
Matt Harrington
January 20th, 2010 at 4:04 PM #
Correction … I’m working on a forum, but it’s not specific to ccp4bb.
John Warren
January 21st, 2010 at 4:26 AM #
Why Matt Harrington? Please see the existing xrayforum http://www.xrayforum.co.uk before you start a new one!