On 08/02/2015 07:52 AM, Rowan Collins wrote:
On 2 August 2015 13:01:57 BST, Dor Tchizik <d...@tchizik.com> wrote:
I propose that internals discussion to be moved (eventually entirely)
to a
different medium, where the example I have in mind is GitHub issues
(but
that is up for discussion).
While I think a different medium could be worth considering, I don't think
squeezing open-ended discussions into an issue management system is a good
idea. I don't think the archives would be any easier to use, and a lot of
conversations don't need elaborate code references. Those that do can use Pull
Requests etc on GitHub already, and we could think of ways of making those more
visible without generating excessive noise on the main list.
There's always a temptation to put everything in one place, but it generally means
compromises in the tools used. For instance, Wikipedia and MediaWiki use wiki pages
for discussion, and Stack Overflow uses Q&A pages, but neither works as well as
something actually designed for threaded discussion.
E-mail has the obvious advantage of being usable in many different ways by different
people. With a decent threaded mail client (i.e. not GMail's web UI, whose
"conversations" have no notion of sub-threads or marking some messages as read
but not others), it's quite easy to pick out the subjects you're interested in, catch up
after a while away, etc. There may be better archive interfaces out there, as I agree
that those aren't great right now.
If you still think mailing lists aren't fit for purpose, though, why not look
at something built for that actual purpose - phpBB, for instance?
As a final note, while encouraging new users is definitely a good thing, any
project the size of PHP will always have a core set of developers who spend a
lot of time working on and discussing it. If you make those people's lives
difficult, no amount of shiny markdown is going to recover their lost effort,
so any process change has to be carefully considered from that angle.
Regards,
+1. Forums were designed for the specific purpose of threaded
discussions. I personally am all for switching to a forum system, but I
know that replacing the mailing list is somewhat controversial.
P.S. I'm really excited for what Flarum <http://flarum.org> will bring
when its released. I'd recommend waiting to use Flarum if we were to set
up a forum. Of course, it's just my preference.
--
Stephen Coakley
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