On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:39:34 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev
wrote:
We recently had a suggestion her for a means of marking
threads as important or useful.
I really think this is entirely unnecessary.
Again, the benefit of such features are debatable. I'm personally
ambivalent to anything other than the ability to edit or delete
posts.
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.
I'm not talking about developer mailing lists. I'm a member of
numerous mailing lists myself. The core developers and
contributors can use mailing lists, NNTP, or smoke signals for
all I care. Those who want to join such lists will and that's
perfectly fine. What I'm talking about is building up a community
of users.
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.
Yes, it's a great piece of work and I am by no means suggesting
we replace it. It would serve as a great foundation for future
features. I just don't think NNTP should be our primary means of
community management.
you'll have a hard time convincing the people who are actually
working on D to switch.
I knew that before I posted :) I'm not expecting any changes now.
I'm just pointing out what I see as a potential future sore spot.
That the web interface exists at all kind of supports my case.
When I first came to D, most communication was done with a
newsreader. The old Digital Mars web interface to the newsgroups
was painful to use. The mailing list interface, IIRC, was added
later. Your work on this forum software made it all imminently
more useful and convenient, thanks to the features you enumerated
above. It opened the door to more users being able to more easily
come in and participate in discussions. I'm simply arguing that
as the community grows, taking things to the next level will open
the door even wider.
It's not something I feel passionately enough about to keep
arguing for, though, so I'll drop it for now :)
