Virtual OS/2 International Consumer Education
VOICE Home Page: http://www.os2voice.org 		May 2003

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Letters, Addenda, Errata

Translation: Christian Hennecke

If you have any comments regarding articles or tips in this or any previous issue of the VOICE Newsletter, please send them to editor@os2voice.org. We are always interested in what our readers have to say.
April 5, 2003 - Our only letter of the month is from Doug Bissett in regard to our editorial Lets Chat in the April issue of the Newsletter:
You can ignore my previous e-mail. I, of all people, should have realized that the FireWall was messing it up. I am connected. Now, to see if I have enough patience to try to learn something about IRC. So far, this doesn't look like a communications path, that I will put up with, for very long. IRC appears to be far too complicated, and I have little interest in using it, for anything. In fact, the only reason I even considered trying it, was because you indicated that your organization actually seems to depend on IRC.

I would suggest, that you may want to consider switching to a news group format. That way, a user could post comments, and replies, at any time of the day, and it would be convenient to everybody, without needing to learn a whole new protocol to enter comments etc. You would lose the real time component, but that seems to me, to be what is causing the drop in "attendance" anyway.

Thanks...
--
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From the eComStation of Doug Bissett
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Our editor replies:
Doug,

Both IRC and forums (Mail, News, Web) have their advantages. The biggest benefit of IRC is that it is realtime and you can have a real discussion and exchange of ideas. Forums are more like mail where you never are sure when or if you will receive a response, and it may come in months or years after you wrote the initial post. I'm still receiving rare responses to a mail survey I did on OS/2 printer drivers a year ago.

Some people (myself included) dislike web forums, though I spend a great deal of time reading through mail lists and Usenet, and I scan IBMFORUM and IWETHEY daily, so I know they can be valuable resources. As to VOICE changing its format, that is up to the VOICE membership and the VOICE board. We've been using IRC since the very beginning when VOICE was still being conceived.

Either way it would be nice if more people got involved with the organization, so more of the work can be spread around and there would be less burden on the people that are active. Otherwise we will continue to see people burn out and leave, which eventually will have VOICE going the way of OS2SS, CincyOS/2 and other OS/2 web sites and groups.

Mark

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