[swift-evolution] [Swift4] Mailing list vs. Forum

[michie.swift at riffic.io]

Incase, the Swift team decided to use a forum.

I would like to suggest Discourse (http://www.discourse.org).
It is one of the most reliable open-source made forum and most  
companies have been using it as their forum/community eg. Dockers,  
Let's Encrypt, etc...

The Swift Team has a choice to host it on their own or pay  
discourse.org to host it for you. Hosting on their own would be more  
cheaper and gives you more control on how you want it to be set up. We  
can easily set up a mailing list to all the people watching the  
discussion and you can add in your own style of Authentication if  
needed.

Slack will be very expensive because Slack cost almost $7 per active  
member per month. If you don't pay, it will definitely be limiting.  
Also, I don't think using chat for this kind of project will be more  
productive as people need to revisit some discussions.

I can help the Swift Team set up Discourse if they are interested and  
they can create a subdomain: https://community.swift.org for it.

Let me know.

Michie :)

Quoting Sean Alling via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org>:

> +1
>
> I think this is a great idea! The use of a mailing list is  
> manageable for a small (2-10) groups but doesn’t scale to the size  
> and frequency of comments/replies that the Swift Open Source project  
> has seen thus far.  Not to mention, it reeks of 1996.
>
> I’m not sure if we should authenticate users via AppleID, because we  
> want the Swift community to remain cross-platform going forward.
>
> A Slack would be a great idea, for banter but may get crazy.  We  
> would want the slack channels to remain subject pure (i.e., no  
> shenanigans). Email is good in this regard in that a reply is  
> expensive and therefore on-topic, whereas slack replies are cheap  
> and therefore easily off topic. Anyone have any idea to combat that?  
> Code of Conduct?
>
> I think in making this decision we should separate the determination  
> that the mailing lists are posing too great a burden at our scale  
> from the selection of what we should use in its stead.
>
> - Sean
>
>
>> I think this thread should focus on the mailing list vs forum, Slack is
>> not a forum. It could be nice to have it as an extra if we need it.
>>
>> It looks to me that all benefits of a mailing list can be achieved by a
>> forum system with excellent support to read and reply using emails. But
>> the opposite is not true, one single simple example: we can't even link
>> related thread using email (as Tino mentioned on the Gmane thread).
>>
>>
>>