[swift-evolution] [Discussion] mailing list alternative

[Jarod Long]

Another +1 for Discourse. I'd like to participate more, but the mailing list format is difficult for me to use.

I've gone through three email clients since swift-evolution started (Apple Mail, then Airmail, and now Spark), and they work well enough for general, simple email usage, but the mailing list experience has been poor enough to discourage me from participating. Threads get split all the time -- right now I see four separate threads for the "Strings in Swift 4" discussion. I'd need to click around each of them to get the entire discussion and piece together the chronology manually, and if I want to participate I need to somehow determine which thread is the correct one to reply to.

I appreciate the philosophy of the mailing list, but I really think that forum software would work much better from a practical standpoint.

I think a chat service like Slack could be useful as well, but not as a replacement for something like a forum. A forum works much better for long-form, asynchronous discussions.

Jarod

On Jan 23, 2017, 09:59 -0800, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org>, wrote:
> It will be painted! ;)
>
> So far we have:
> +2 Disclosure
> +1 Slack
> +1 Issue tracker
>
> Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about moving over.
>
> Alvarado, Joshua
>
> On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:55 AM, David Waite <david at alkaline-solutions.com> wrote:
>
> > As long as we are pretending this bike shed is getting painted again…
> >
> > I would actually prefer something closer to an issue tracker than discourse. We get a lot of repeat and diverging topics, and it would be nice to mark discussions as related, duplicates, etc
> >
> > -DW
> >
> > > On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > +1 for Discourse. Cannot wait any longer for this to happen.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Adrian Zubarev
> > > Sent with Airmail
> > >
> > > Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution (swift-evolution at swift.org) schrieb:
> > > > Hey swifters,
> > > >   I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go back through the history.
> > > >
> > > > The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > Joshua Alvarado
> > > > alvaradojoshua0 at gmail.com
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > swift-evolution mailing list
> > > > swift-evolution at swift.org
> > > > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > swift-evolution mailing list
> > > swift-evolution at swift.org
> > > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
> >
> _______________________________________________
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