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
