I've thought about this many times while reading messages on internals, but from another perspective: the inability to "+1" a message without having to reply. I very often find myself agreeing (or disagreeing) with someone, but refrain myself from posting a one-liner to show my support. Having something like GitHub reactions to be able to "+1" or "-1" a message could be invaluable to get the overall sentiment of the participants (even the silent readers) when browsing through the thread.
When I browse an issue or a PR on GitHub, the reactions help me quickly see which messages stand out of the crowd, be it positively or negatively, and usually help me get quickly a good idea of what's going on there, when I don't have the time to read through every single message. IMO, replacing the mailing list with a GitHub-like discussion would bring several advantages: - no more top-posting, etc.: this would be a web app, not a dumb email software that (sometimes unreliably) quotes everything by default. - possibility to use markdown: invaluable to make a message more readable - possibility to add reactions to messages, even from silent readers - possibility to react to previous messages, for someone who just joined the list, without having to invoke ezmlm black magic Also, I think this would lower the level of entry to internals for a lot of PHP developers who aren't otherwise interested in participating in discussions, but could appreciate being able to give their opinion on the future of PHP. And for maintainers, this would represent invaluable feedback to see the sentiment from the crowd, not only from the usual suspects. Externals.io does a pretty good job, but suffers from many drawbacks that can hardly be solved: - it's still reading emails, so while it does a good job at putting everyting together quite nicely, it's sometimes confused by the syntax, especially quoting - you can vote on threads (stackoverflow-style), but not on individual messages; and because externals.io is not everyone's main way of reading through internals, this lowers the number of potential reactions - there is no way to reply to a message, you have to get back to your email - there is no real support for markdown; a few things are supported, but I find them quite unreliable and am never really happy with how my hand-crafted message looks over there Ideally, we could create a custom web app to move the discussions to. I'd love to participate in creating it, even initiate the project, if time permits. This would also allow adding interesting stuff, like user statistics, user post history, etc.) Finally, regarding GitHub, I'm personally not against moving the discussions there; I'm using it every day and find it very convenient to discuss software; I do understand the concerns expressed above though. One thing that could be checked, is whether their API allows retrieving the whole discussion history programmatically. If so, one could setup a database to sync all messages to on a regular basis, so that the PHP project could move the discussions back to their own system should something bad happen. — Benjamin
