By the way, let's not forget we already have a forum that works with our mailing-lists: ie. the Nabble forum! See at the bottom of the page the integration: http://www.groovy-lang.org/mailing-lists.html
On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 2:35 PM, Jochen Theodorou <blackd...@gmx.org> wrote: > On 02.01.2018 04:45, Nathan Harvey wrote: > >> Once again I would like to bring up the idea of starting a forum using >> Discourse. In particular, I would like to highlight some of the features >> Discourse offers that are relevant to the mailing list, for those concerned >> about making the switch: >> >> - Supports replying to conversations and PMs via email out of the box >> - Can be configured to allow starting conversations and private messages >> via email >> - Support SSO via numerous providers, so no need to create a separate >> account >> >> Discourse inherits all of the functionality of the mailing list (some >> assembly required), and on top of that offers all the modern features you >> would expect from a forum. It's free and it's open source. The Discourse >> team will even offer free hosting and setup for open source projects like >> Groovy. Many other projects like Kotlin utilize this system. >> > > Being at apache with have the requirement to document all of the > development relevant decisions and their discussions. The only accepted way > for this I do know right now is the developers mailing list. > > I don´t think it would be a hard requirement to be able to actually post > to groovy-dev, but since notifications are posts, there is not much point > in making a difference here imho. But to be able to really work as an > archive we require the message id logic working, to allow the apache > archive to see the whole thread. > > And then there is the cost factor. You talk of free hosting and setup. > Does such a setup enable the features we require? Finally there is the > hosting problem. It is unclear to me if hosting the forum outside apache > lands is ok. At least the domain must be under apache control. > > For me that is the minimum requirement that has to be met to work with > apache. > > Then let us talk about groovy-user, because in case of groovy-user we do > not really have these restriction. So I do see the possibility for > groovy-user. > > My personal experience though is not speaking for a forum. If I have a > waiting time of 5 minutes I can very well read through same mails and mark > important ones I my want to reply later to, once I have more time. > Filtering and sorting by my mail client really helps me here. Plus,even if > I have no internet I can read my mails, write answers and then send them > once I have internet again. The later one can be done only with a client of > course. But even ignoring that and only looking at sorting and marking I do > not know of any forum with that capability to the extend that I need. > Obviously a forum requires a different approach. > > But frankly... If I take that old groovy forum, or SO or any other > approach I have seen so far... I never became an active participant for > long. Either it was so low volume, that I did not want to spend time there > just to find nothing or it was so high volume, that I had trouble finding > the posts of interest. The gradle forum is an example for this. And that > forum is not bad... you just need to approach things different and with > more time. > > On the other hand I am on more than a dozen mailing lists and it does not > matter to me if they are low or high volume. Sure I am not reading all of > the messages and to some I should probably unsubscribe as well, but it is > not bothering me at all. Without a proper email client for this kind of > stuff I can of course very well understand that they cannot handle mailing > lists. > > As for the problem of having "too many channels to manage" it would be >> feasible to set up the forums to alert mailing list users that a new topic >> has been started. >> > > Just for you to maybe understand the extend... I get a mail for every pull > request, every comment on github, every jira entry for groovy. Which means > my mail client is the entry point to jira, to github, to our normal mailing > lists and many other things. Sure, if I want to reply to a github comment I > do so by going to github, but still I am getting informed about them at a > single point. And now have that for 3 more projects and you get a real > feeling of what "one channel to manage" means for me. Even if you did bring > all that to discourse I would still use my mail client widely for other > projects and mailing lists. > > This would help bridge the gap between the two platforms. >> > > just informing about a new topic is not enough, but already helps for low > volume lists. The problem is you will not get informed about followup mails > though. And if people need days for a reply, you may never read it. > > My conclusion is that even if we had a forum my first entry point would > still have to be mail, or I would automatically reduce my reading time in > Groovy and thus reducing my answering time, because now answering time will > have to be reading time as well. Not on purpose of course. Maybe it works > for groovy-user better. But then it would still mean I would be less on > groovy-user. > > bye Jochen > > -- Guillaume Laforge Apache Groovy committer & PMC Vice-President Developer Advocate @ Google Cloud Platform Blog: http://glaforge.appspot.com/ Social: @glaforge <http://twitter.com/glaforge> / Google+ <https://plus.google.com/u/0/114130972232398734985/posts>
