On Sun, Aug 08, 2021 at 03:26:25PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
To be honest I don't think that mailing lists are a very good venue for user support and I would these days prefer to direct people to a Stack Overflow-like site.
I agree with you to some extent. I've wondered for a long while whether Mailman 3 and it's "HyperKitty" web front-end could be a solution. You retain the mailing list (which persists despite all the SO-like sites, forums, etc we've tried over the years) but gain an interface to it which addresses some of the usability issues that are frustrating newer posters (and putting off unknown numbers of non-posters). I've not made heavy use of HyperKitty myself, so it remains a vague "this looks interesting" rather than a formal proposal from me. I believe the Fedora project use it. Here's an example recent thread from Fedora's devel list which is illuminating. <https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/de...@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/OJVAZOVC62E6IYVUMG5N4EMX4JII2PMN/> You see a forum-like interface; there's visible threading. The little "Thumbs up / Thumbs down" icons are an attempt to meet the needs of those people who would otherwise reply to a post "+1" etc.; they do not seem to be in use in this thread. (I don't know how successful they've been at heading off that kind of reply). There's also some examples of behaviours which are NOT fixed by the web UI: the second message to the list is a one-line top-post which quotes the entirety of the first post, and that is displayed in full. I suppose another issue (compared to a "real" forum) is posts cannot be edited after sending. The UI could of course improve over time to detect and fold/flatten such mails by default, or similar. -- Please do not CC me for listmail. 👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland ✎ j...@debian.org 🔗 https://jmtd.net
