Apologies for getting this reply late, but I had to run before I finished this email. Replies inline and bottom-posted. ;-)
On 12/2/13 9:45 PM, David Piepgrass wrote: > 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. > I respectfully suggest that you consider finding a new email client. These are solved problems. > 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. > Filters in a mail client address this. > 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? A quite reasonable point, no doubt about it. I have chosen to use my alumni email with my real name, but I recognize that others might choose otherwise. > > (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.) This is a classic "everyone else wants vs techie wants" argument. I vastly prefer the techie approaches, as a rule of thumb. I personally think that the techie desires should win for a while. Of course, many other people (most, probably) disagree. > > And like mailing lists, Discourse also supports private messages. Unfortunately, these private messages are tied to the discourse system, which, for all we know, might die. Email is a known medium with (somewhat) portable archiving - both on the archive server and on the personal computer(s). > > 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?). > Again, this ties the communications into a third party system. Why *not* let GPG sigs provide authentication? > I heard discourse supports attachments, just that you may have to go to > the forum to attach or download them (rather than by email). > More grief I really don't want to deal with - figuring out how to attach stuff in yet another interface. I am very happy with my Mozilla Thunderbird! Then the rust team have to consider how to store the attachments, manage the discourse server, etc... Me, I'd rather see the Mozilla team focus on Rust rather than server admin work. > > Just for discussion - example Discourse site: http://try.discourse.org/ I have generally been happy with Discourse search, overall - I don't have any complaints with it. Further problems with discourse in my experience: Infinite scroll doesn't let you jump to page n of the board. I really like being able to do that on mailing lists. I've used it to browse archives from a decade ago by date n stuff. Perhaps I'm not expert at the UI however. Space inefficiency in heading sizes (maybe just out of the box, dunno). User list avatar images on the posts scales sideways - not a good thing when lots of people are contributing. The discourse UI is very web 2.0 & 2010s-ish. That makes it visually more attractive; but I still favor my email client Thunderbird & mailing lists because they work & are the standard open source interface for long-form discussion, without the downsides of web sites. I have search, authentication (via gpg), threaded archives, separation of email. I appreciate that in the long term, when the goal is wide adoption, the humble open source mailing list so beloved by the techies will not be the optimal approach to draw all people in. But I think I will stick with the mailing lists even then. -- Regards, Paul
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