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

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