On 02/12/2013 16:21, David Piepgrass wrote:

> > That would be so. much. better. than a mailing list.
>
> Hi. Could you expand on this? I don?t necessarily disagree, but as the
> one proposing change it?s up to you to convince everyone else :)
>
> --
> Simon Sapin
>

Okay, well, I've never liked mailing lists at all, because:

1. In non-digest mode, My inbox gets flooded.
2. In digest mode, it's quite inconvenient to write a reply, having to cut
out all the messages that I don't want to reply to and manually edit the
subject line. Also, unrelated messages are grouped together while threads
are broken apart, making discussions harder to follow.
3. In email I don't get a threaded view. If I go to mailing list archives
to see a threaded view, I can't reply.
4. I have to manually watch for replies to my messages or to threads I'm
following. If someone mentions my name (not that they would), I won't be
notified.

In contrast, Discourse has a variety of email notification options. I don't
know if those options are enough to please everybody, but you can probably
configure it to notify you about all posts, which makes it essentially
equivalent to a mailing list. It supports reply by email, so those that
prefer a mailing list can still pretend it's a mailing list. Currently I'm
getting an shrunk digest of Discourse Meta--by email I only get a subset of
all messages, auto-selected by Discourse, whatever it thinks is
interesting. That's good for me: I really don't want to see every message.

Plus, a mailing list offers less privacy as it mandates publishing your
email address. That's not a big deal for me personally, but do you really
want to require that from every Rust user?

(btw, if I'm wrong about any of the above points, I promise there are lots
of other netizens out there who have the same misconception(s), so many of
them will avoid mailing lists. The fact that y'all are talking to me on a
mailing list suggests that the disadvantages of a mailing list are not a
big deal *to you*, but as for those who aren't participating, you can't
conclude *they* prefer mailing lists.)

And like mailing lists, Discourse also supports private messages.

I don't understand why Paul mentioned GPG. You want to encrypt messages to
a public mailing list? You can sign messages, but surely almost no one
actually checks the signature, and I'd be surprised if Discourse didn't
offer some built-in evidence of identity (surely it's not like email in
letting you spoof the sender name easily?).

I heard discourse supports attachments, just that you may have to go to the
forum to attach or download them (rather than by email).
_______________________________________________
Rust-dev mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev

Reply via email to