Using Apple Developer Forums would cause people to leave swift-evolution (a 
prediction). I don’t think they offer a good enough experience for quick 
discussions like mailing lists or Discourse do.

My question is: would we gain more people than we would lose in moving over to 
something like Discourse?

I don’t think a lot of people on here are grasping the high burden mailing 
lists place on people not familiar with them

Brandon

> On Aug 3, 2016, at 10:02 PM, Paulo Faria via swift-evolution 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Exactly what I was going to say. Why not use Apple’s forum?
> It’s there already. It’s just a matter of using it. Some are saying things 
> like, the core team should be focused on working on the language, etc. That’s 
> so obvious that it shouldn’t even be said. This is a fact, but a fact that 
> has nothing to do with having a good communication medium. It’s just a matter 
> of decision. The core team could decide we use apple’s forum instead of the 
> mailing list, boom, done. If we need any extra features from the forum, it’s 
> not gonna be the core team to deal with. It will be the people that are 
> already responsible for the apple forum.
> 
>> On Aug 3, 2016, at 6:47 AM, David Hart via swift-evolution 
>> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> 
>> I did not have the time to counter all those points but I was going to and 
>> point that Discourse has a solution for nearly all of those. I would REALLY 
>> prefer having the mailing-list part of the discussion on Discourse.
>> 
>>> On 03 Aug 2016, at 07:46, Jacob Bandes-Storch via swift-evolution 
>>> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I hope my replies aren't too curt — I don't want to pick a fight (any more 
>>> than I did by starting this topic), but to explore how Discourse can serve 
>>> these use cases. Feel free to re-rebut.
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 3:03 PM, Brent Royal-Gordon <[email protected] 
>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I don't think enough has been said in favor of mailing lists. Some 
>>> advantages for them:
>>> 
>>> 1. Available on every platform.
>>> Browsers too.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 2. Performant on every platform. (Discourse, for instance, struggles on 
>>> Android.)
>>> Browsers are heavily tuned for performance, and Discourse is a relatively 
>>> lightweight site. If you prefer the performance of your email client, 
>>> there's mailing list mode.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 3. Native on every platform.
>>> Browsers too.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 4. Based on open standards with multiple implementations.
>>> Browsers too. You may argue that the forum itself is too centralized, but 
>>> Mailman is necessarily centralized too.
>>> 
>>> And this isn't always a positive: formatting of styled, quoted, and even 
>>> plain text is quite varied among email clients, so popular threads often 
>>> end up looking like huge messes.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 5. Does not require you to proactively check swift-evolution.
>>> Email notification settings, or full-on mailing list mode, or RSS, can 
>>> solve this.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 6. Supports offline reading and drafting.
>>> Mailing list mode or RSS / reply-by-email.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 7. Supports clients with alternate feature sets.
>>> Discourse has RSS feeds and JSON APIs.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 8. Supports bot clients for both sending (like the CI bot) and receiving 
>>> (like Gmane).
>>> Discourse has an API 
>>> <https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-api-documentation/22706> which can 
>>> be used for posting. It also supports bot-like plugins 
>>> <https://github.com/discourse/try-bot/blob/master/plugin.rb> which can 
>>> respond to various events, although I imagine that requires self-hosting. 
>>> External bots interested in receiving would probably need to poll RSS, or 
>>> just make use of mailing list mode as a receive hook.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 9. Supports user-specific automatic filtering.
>>> Topics and categories in Discourse each support a range of notification 
>>> options from "watching" to "muted". My understanding is that these settings 
>>> are respected by mailing list mode.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 10. Users can privately annotate messages.
>>> Discourse has "bookmarks", basically a way of saving individual 
>>> posts/replies for yourself. Users can also send themselves private messages 
>>> <https://meta.discourse.org/t/support-multiple-new-topic-drafts/7263/15?u=jtbandes>
>>>  for note-taking purposes.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 11. Drafts and private messages are not visible to any central 
>>> administrator.
>>> I'm not sure whether Discourse drafts are saved on the server. Moderators 
>>> are restricted from viewing private messages 
>>> <https://meta.discourse.org/t/permission-changes-moderators-have-less/12522>.
>>>  Of course, you can always contact someone via other means.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 12. History is stored in a distributed fashion; there is no single point of 
>>> failure that could wipe out swift-evolution's history.
>>> This is a fair point. But: 
>>> - The Git repository of proposals is distributed.
>>> - Discourse is as easily backed up as any other computer system: 
>>> https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-automatic-backups-for-discourse/14855
>>>  
>>> <https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-automatic-backups-for-discourse/14855>
>>> - Users who would like a low-fidelity local copy for themselves can enable 
>>> mailing list mode.
>>> - Anyone is free to access/archive publicly accessible content using the 
>>> APIs.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> 13. Usually the medium of choice for large-scale, long-running open source 
>>> projects.
>>> 
>>> Is that just because people already know how to use email? Is it because 
>>> the projects are so long-running that email was the best/only choice when 
>>> they started? I'm not sure anyone has done real academic research on the 
>>> use of mailing lists in open source projects. If someone can find any, I'd 
>>> be interested to read it.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> I could probably go on, but I'll stop here for now.
>>> 
>>> I would love to have a great web archive for swift-evolution—something with 
>>> a really solid search function, good threading, and most of the other 
>>> niceties of forums. It'd even be nice to have an upvote feature. But these 
>>> are all things that you could do without taking swift-evolution off of 
>>> email.
>>> 
>>> This seems like status quo bias to me. It's just as valid to *start* with a 
>>> great forum system, and build any desirable additional features on top, as 
>>> it is to start with a mailing list and build additional features on top. 
>>> (Discourse being open-source is a pretty big advantage in terms of the 
>>> ability to add features.)
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> swift-evolution mailing list
>>> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>>> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution 
>>> <https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution>
>> 
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