On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:39:34 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 08:41:18 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
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.

I don't think he's talking about sticky placement, as much as some kind of tagging of threads. Of course, that raises issues of how you surface those tagged threads and whether people will bother applying the tags.

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?

Not only can I imagine it, I would say it to his face. Mailing lists were incredibly outdated back when I first encountered them decades ago, let alone today, which is why I have never used them.

The truth is that familiarity with mailing lists is simply necessary for any serious software developer.

Not really, in fact, you can easily tell which dev teams are ancient by the fact that they still use a mailing list as the main form of communication.

Now, there are certainly benefits to SMTP/NNTP that centralized forums don't have, no question, and a lot of web forum software is ridiculously broken and even worse than a mailing list. But you could do a lot better than a mailing list, it's just rarely done. I though Apache Wave had some interesting ideas on collaboration, though I never tried it, so I can't say if they pulled it off.

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.
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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.

As I understood what Mike originally wrote and he's now made certain below, nobody is critizing DFeed for its features or suggesting replacing it, only removing the lowest-common denominator accomodation of email and newgroup readers.

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, I've seen that praise too, DFeed is a good showcase for D. The "Save and preview" button was a great addition; I use it often, particularly for long posts, and it largely obviates his desire to edit a post whenever.

I'd like some sort of formatting language, like github has. Can't you provide that option in the forum and send the resulting HTML as text/html MIME attachments to SMTP and NNTP? I don't know if NNTP supports MIME. Of course, some may complain about HTML messages, but perhaps they can be handed some text formatting fallback? Anyway, not a huge issue, but nice to have.

The current messaging status quo, where everyone gets an undifferentiated stream of messages and then are forced to manually scan the headings or run a keyword search on all the contents, is incredibly outdated. However, advancing beyond that will require some work, either to manually tag and vote on posts/threads or write software that will at least automate tagging, which is why it is rarely done.

But we need to move beyond this decades-old tech someday, as it's wasting too much of our time.

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