On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 08:41:18 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
Yeah, I get that. But then we're maintaining two separate
databases. The database for the web interface should be the
primary, with all of the post meta-data stored together with
the posts themselves in one place. Then, people who pull the
posts in a newsreader after any edits have been made will at
least see the edited posts (still nothing to do for the mailing
list subscribers, I suppose).
NNTP users won't see the successive edits, though, and those who
have their newsreader poll the server won't see them at all.
It also allows much easier moderation, not relying on the news
server admin to delete spam and any posts that go beyond the
bounds of propriety.
I don't think we have an issue with moderation.
The spam filter could be a bit better, I suppose. Then again, we
get MUCH less spam than any off-the-shelf forum software, since
the spambot authors target them specifically, thus their spambots
will find their way in much easier.
More than once I've seen people post here looking for a way to
edit or delete their posts.
Perhaps forum.dlang.org could make it clearer that once a post is
sent, it is immutable.
We recently had a suggestion her for a means of marking threads
as important or useful.
I really think this is entirely unnecessary.
"Sticky" threads on typical web forums are used to post things
such as FAQs or things people should read before posting.
Essentially, in pretty much all cases, this feature is used as a
poor way to change the website in general in order to bring some
things to users' attention.
If the latter feature becomes required, since we have full
control over the forum website's contents as a whole, we can look
at how we can implement that feature properly (e.g. by adding a
notice at the top of the thread list, or to the "create new
thread" form, etc.)
Still, I think this feature is only really necessary for websites
where "the forum is the website". We could just as well post
important information to dlang.org.
If you have a specific need, we can discuss that.
These are the sorts of thing that people *expect* today,
whether everyone finds them beneficial or not. It's just one
more thing about the D community that doesn't jibe with
expectations, like the way the web site looked before the
revamp. It's not a major issue in and of itself, just an
annoyance and a lack of convenience, but taken together as a
part of the whole it's one more point of complaint. One that
could be easily resolved.
I really don't think that "mailing list phobia" is something we
need to pay much attention to. Any way you turn it, it comes down
to personal preference, and once you have configured your email
client to deal with mailing lists in a nice way, there is not
much left to object to. Ultimately, all serious open-source
software projects do their development on mailing lists. The
Linux kernel, Git, Gnome, KDE, LibreOffice, you name it. Can you
imagine someone telling Linus Torvalds with a straight face that
mailing lists are antiquated and it's time for him and his gang
to get on with the times? The truth is that familiarity with
mailing lists is simply necessary for any serious software
developer.
Don't forget that forum.dlang.org has features that no other
forum software can offer, features many people depend on. That
includes its NNTP/email interoperability - one third of users
communicating on this group don't do it via the forum. (If you
think that one third is not too bad, don't forget that that
includes most of the core team.) The ratio will probably be lower
on "learn", but higher on the more technical groups.
The forum offers multiple view modes. Many people don't use the
default one, which mimics typical web forums. One view mode I've
added at Andrei's request, I think he will be unhappy to see it
go.
The D forum also seems to be frequently lauded outside D's
community for its performance, and people seem to often present
in as an example of D's capabilities. It seems that any time
someone posts a link to forum.dlang.org, someone mentions its
unusually low response times.
I am continuously collecting (constructive) feedback about the
forum. Last year I made an overhaul and implemented nearly all
feature requests. If you have specific requests for improvement,
please create a GitHub issue:
https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/issues
All in all, I'm rather certain that as soon as an actual serious
proposal to replace forum.dlang.org with e.g. Discourse appears,
it will face just as much, if not more, vocal disagreement. You
can always create a poll or something if you wish - out of
curiosity, since as mentioned above, you'll have a hard time
convincing the people who are actually working on D to switch.
