On 2013-12-03 18:45, Brian Anderson wrote: > On 12/03/2013 06:02 AM, Benjamin Striegel wrote: >> > The idea of an online user forum would be that people with an >> interest in Rust can read in the user forum which is easier to peruse >> than some mail list archive. Asking and getting answers seems to work >> more fluently. >> >> I agree with the principle, but we have yet to identify what users >> would actually want to peruse in a discussion forum. For questions, we >> have StackOverflow. For keeping up with the cool projects that the >> community is working on, we have reddit. Piggybacking on established >> platforms will lead to easier discoverability and broader readership. > > I also believe that we should lean heavily on external resources > wherever possible. Maintaining our own infrastructure is very time > consuming and we've already got a lot. We could put more focus on > stackoverflow by linking it from the wiki and encouraging community > members to curate it better (I know I haven't looked at it in a long time). > > Currently, I'm more in favor of adding a rust-users mailing list than > setting up a web forum, but there are pros and cons to each approach: > > * creating another *type* of venue for general discussion runs the risk > of dividing the user base > * mailing lists are easy to create and administer at Mozilla > * web forums can be much easier to moderate, and we've had a few > incidents on the mailing list recently > * mailing lists are simple to archive and maintaining a record of Rust's > development is imortant to me > * if we did set up a forum, it seems like we should shut down the > mailing list to avoid dividing the user base, which feels kind of > unfortunate simply because having a mailing list is a matter of pride >
An additional point in favor of mailing lists is that web forums cannot be accessed through a standard API (such as NNTP) which means that they cannot be accessed through the incredibly useful GMANE.org NNTP<->mailing list two-way gateway. Regards, _______________________________________________ Rust-dev mailing list Rust-dev@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev
