On Tuesday, August 21, 2018 8:40:32 AM MDT Steven Schveighoffer via Digitalmars-d wrote: > On the contrary, many of the regular contributors here, don't give a > lick about the forum software, as long as it's primarily backed by the > newsgroup server. Many, including myself use the NG server, many others > use the mailing list interface. If the NG was ditched, I would have a > big problem communicating, as I hate dealing with web forums.
I use the mailing list interface and have since well before the current forum interface was added. I have years worth of history available offline, and I can easily keep track of what I have and haven't read, even if I access it from separate machines (which is actually why I use the mailing list rather than the newsgroup - the newsgroup software that I used previously had no way to sync which messages were read between machines). I do use web forums for other communities, but I _much_ prefer being able to use my e-mail client to using a web interface. And plenty of other programming communities use mailing lists rather than web forums. The only real downside I see to mailing lists is that they're more of a pain if you just want to look at the content occasionally rather than actually being involved. So, they definitely favor people who follow them actively over folks who are very casual about it. But our system has the advantage of giving folks three different interfaces to the same content. So, you can choose whichever you prefer. The only major downside I see to the current setup is folks who don't understand that the "forum" is just one of several interfaces to a newsgroup, and they come in here and complain that the forum software doesn't have some feature or other that they want. Maybe some of those features would be nice, but they generally do not go well with either a newsgroup or mailing list (which a large percentage of the major contributors use), and in my experience, the features you get from a newsgroup or mailing list are more than adequate for the kind of communication that goes on here. I would be _very_ unhappy if we ever switched to something else like discourse or if the forum software got features that resulted in folks there posting a bunch of markup or the like instead of plain text, since that would be bad for the mailing list and newsgroup users. Fortunately, since Walter is a newsgroup user and definitely seems to like the current setup, it's unlikely that it's going to be screwed up any time soon. - Jonathan M Davis