On Tue, 29 Sep 2020 at 10:25, Milan Crha via desktop-devel-list <
desktop-devel-list@gnome.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2020-09-25 at 14:33 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> > and make contributing to GNOME more attractive to newcomers.
>
> Hi,
> do you think the newcomers do not know how the mail works? Or it's used
> as an excuse to replace something working for years with something new,
> with new bugs, its maintenance requests and such? Just wondering.
>
You're making a simple and understandable mistake, here: email is one
thing, mailing lists are another. The two should not be conflated.
To be more specific, mailing lists have terrible signal-to-noise ratio, and
terrible moderation tools. Both issues have a definite impact on newcomers,
as well as veterans of a project; the amount of people actively engaging on
mailing lists in the GNOME project has been trending down over the past
decade or so, compared to the early 2000s—and we were complaining about
decreased SNR even back then. For a newcomer, mailing lists are hard to
search in, and hard to contribute to; for long time contributors, mailing
lists are mostly noise.
Discourse is an attempt at solving the issue; it's much more effective at
managing signal-to-noise ratio, because on Discourse you can explicitly tag
topics; split them and merge them at any point in time; re-tag and
re-categorise topics; and all the history is preserved, instead of leaving
trails of threads around different lists that are, effectively impossible
to follow. Additionally, its moderation tools are based on a bottom-up
approach, instead of having a selected list of people that have to edit the
content. The longer you use Discourse (from its web UI), the more you are
"trusted"; and the more you are trusted, the more access you have, and the
more you're entrusted with moderating and curating the community. Topics,
posts, and users can be easily flagged for moderation, and anti-spam
measures are much more effective.
There's also an infrastructure side of things, which cannot be discounted:
large mailing lists are virtually indistinguishable from spam, in the eyes
of the people who own mail servers; currently, we're operating a large set
of mailing lists by asking to be whitelisted in the various anti-spam
systems, but we're always one bug or one bad day away from the whole house
of cards crashing down. This is not the '90s any more. Discourse is a web
application that runs inside its own container; it's mostly easy to deploy,
and since it's maintained, it gets updated fairly often; from a sysadmin
perspective, it's well-integrated in our infrastructure.
Ciao,
Emmanuele.
--
https://www.bassi.io
[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]
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