On 3/23/21 11:37, Alfie Pates wrote:
More opinions, from someone old and jaded enough to prefer IRC but
quite a bit younger than the NANOG mailing list itself!
I feel like Mattermost bridged into a private IRC server (Matterbridge
is really good at puppetry these days:
https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
<https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge>) would cover the widest gamut
of old hands who like IRC and newer users more familiar with
slack/discord/similar platforms, without forcing people onto one or
the other. (Discord bridging is also a possibility, but I cannot
emphasise enough how absolutely unenthusiastic I am using Discord for
anything work-related.)
As for improving the mailing list experience, I think a migration to
mailman3 would make interacting with the mailing list a lot more
friendly for folks not used to the quirks of mailman2. Hyperkitty (the
mailman3 archives renderer / web interface) is a really nice
experience for browsing list archives, and has functionality to enable
replies / new threads / etc, which are _super_ usable. Again, I think
this would cover the widest gamut of users both new and old, whilst
still remaining definitively a mailing list and allowing searching of
all of the NANOG archives.
Discourse is an utterly dire user experience for a larger community
such as NANOG. I'm subscribed to a few Discourse instances - the
mailing-list mode just isn't worth using (It does not behave like a
traditional mailing list, nor a forum!) and I find the web interface
sluggish and fairly unintuitive (scaling is apparently expensive): All
of this seems to contribute to a much less satisfying forum experience.
Personally, I'm not bothered by any of this at all. The state-of-the-art
will naturally gravitate to where it wants to go, and the dust will
settle where it does.
I quite enjoy the mailing list format, but in as much as I am now
running Telegram on my desktop to interact with the kids that aren't
keen on the mailing list alternative of the forum, I have accepted that
I will simply have to be ready and adapt to the order of the day, or get
left behind in my utopia.
There's no right or wrong answer... just what is.
Mark.
