[swift-evolution] [Discussion] mailing list alternative

[Karl Wagner]

It discourages trivial contributions in theory only. In practice there is no difference. I see plenty of one-line comments and corrections. Take a look at any reasonably long thread on here and I'm sure you'll see the same.
 

 
Personally I think that's an absurd reason not to move to a forum. What is your complaint? That it's _too_ inclusive? That others only have trivial things to say? Frankly, every way I try to interpret your comment makes it come off as snobbery.
 

 
This change is long overdue, and I'd recommend we either start beta-testing on swift.org or somebody build a parallel site to support the style of open community which the core-team seem unwilling/unable to do.
 

 
These threads come up pretty much every month. We have a proof of concept. Just like any change, there will be some esoteric cases where people are less happy, but it's frankly absurd to suggest this wouldn't be a hugely popular change. Do a formal proposal if you want -- I would lay money on it getting passed.
 

 
- Karl
 
 
 

 
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> On Feb 2, 2017 at 7:45 pm,  <Erica Sadun via swift-evolution (mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org)>  wrote:
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> > On Feb 1, 2017, at 4:34 AM, David Hart via swift-evolution  <swift-evolution at swift.org (mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org)>  wrote:
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> >  On 1 Feb 2017, at 06:59, Thorsten Seitz via swift-evolution  <swift-evolution at swift.org (mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org)>  wrote:
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> > > While I'm not really happy with the mailing list, this is mostly due to restrictions of iOS Mail which makes keeping track of relevant threads and filtering out threads I'm not interested in difficult.
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> > > The mailing list has one important advantage over a web interface: most of my reading happens on a train to and from work. On this train the connection is for most parts of the ride so bad that I can't download new messages, but fortunately that is not necessary because I can read all those messages I downloaded earlier on the railway station.
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> > > With a web interface I expect that to be much more problematic because it would have to download each message or maybe at least each thread on demand.
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> > Discourse has a mailing list mode to have send you and accept email replies. You'd be covered.
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> Discourse has the outward appearance of a forum. Because of that, it will naturally adopt the social behaviors typical of a forum. In forums, light back and forth is common, and there's no way for mods to "remove" messages from having been emailed out. Natural forum-like idle chatter can overwhelm the traffic of those of us who prefer mailing list mode so we can sort, track, flag, and filter the on-list conversations.    To get a sense, check out the traffic on  https://swift-lang.slack.com  and  https://iosdevelopers.slack.com.
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> A mailing list discourages off-topic and trivial contributions.    I could easily see being sent dozens of emails from a single back and forth.    Increased traffic would force most users to migrate from email to direct Discourse forums and direct forum use loses the ability to flag, filter, and sort discussions. You can't scan, mark, and put away threads you've already dealt with. This would be a massive loss of utility for those of us who need to keep on top of language discussions for work.
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> I do prefer upgrading to Mailman 3.
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> -- E
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>  _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list  swift-evolution at swift.org (mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org)   https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution          
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