On Sun, 20 Nov 2022 19:10:07 +0100 (CET), Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging <tagging@openstreetmap.org> wrote: >> the first and foremost reason for the tagging mailing list to exist was the >> desire to offload tagging discussions on a central place, off the other >> channels, because people there felt overwhelmed with the discussions needed >> to agree on tags to describe the whole world, and it seemed helpful to >> reduce the volume on the talk list to a size that can be followed with >> significantly less dedication of time. Moving back to discussing tagging >> everywhere will make these other channels less useful for some people, I >> guess. Maybe this is unfounded because it came out, tagging is relevant all >> over OpenStreetMap (i.e. tagging discussions already happen on all channels, >> lately even on osmf-talk) and you can hardly ignore it, and because the >> structure of the contributors has changed, or something like > The new forum may be also more capable of handling large volume of posts - > you can > easily mute threads and entire categories.
"muting categories" is "unsubscribing from that specific mailing list", right (e.g. I can decide to unsubscribe from "Tagging" or from "Talk-hr" or whichever other list)? I don't particularly like Discourse "you are subscribed to everything by default" philosophy either, as I much prefer "opt-in" methods like in mailing lists. While you can mute a category (and repeat that as new categories get created), it is annoying (and not easy to find about and actually use -so much about it being "newbie friendly"). While I find some Discourse features useful (liking posts, multi-post-quoting, @mention), others are quite bad: - horribly confusing replying UI (I guess vast majority of users incorrectly replies to whole thread istead of the message, and never find an option to create subthread / reply in new linked topic) - horrible thread / subthread following (with no multi-layer threading support) - no *visual* "threading tree" indication (who replied to what), without doing manual tree reconstruction by clicking on all posts arrows manually. Even (argumably very rudimentary) Tagging mailing list archives do it much better - practically nonexistent scoring (you can bookmark a specific post, and even that in almost unusable way) (mail or news clients can do so much much more to make it usable, especially if thread continues for *weeks*) - no message filter (and lacking search) - only one discussion (with horrible "drafts" implementation which fails in painful ways if one has more than one tab open. Even old forum was much much better here!) - inability to treat different categories differently (yes I can track/watch the topic, but I can't make watched topics in Talk-hr behaving differently than watched topics in Tagging; and I'd very much want to -- alternative is falling back to lowest common denominator, which doesn't work well) - javascript requirement (and accessibility issues) - GUI requirement - inability to change UI to access same data (as oposed to mailing list, where if I don't like one mail user agent, I (or anyone else) can easily switch to another one. Discourse is forcing "one-size-fits-all", even if it doesn't fit you in particular). to name but a few. In short, I find Discourse work well for short discussions (up to max. 10-15 messages), but becomes totally unusable on bigger threads esp. with subthreads (e.g. highway=scramble discussion with 100+ messages). As tagging topics are more likely to produce bigger discussions, I find Discourse poor match for that specific purpose. It might be quite better match for very-low-traffic regional mailing lists (like my country own Talk-hr). > As result massive posting in one thread is easier to ignore in its entirety. > > This is in theory achievable with filtering and so on, but much harder to > apply in > practice, with mailing lists. I guess it might depend on mail user agent being used. It should be very easy, e.g.: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ignore-threads With advantages that one can also ignore certain sub-threads only if one so chooses. (note that I'm using more advanced client than that, but for example choose Mozilla Thunderbird as common, free, and easily available newbie-friendly MUA, which still has that feature implemented much better than Discourse) -- Opinions above are GNU-copylefted. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
