[swift-evolution] [swift-users] Plan to move swift-evolution and swift-users mailing lists to Discourse

[Jens Alfke]

> On Feb 9, 2017, at 3:41 AM, Jan Neumüller via swift-users <swift-users at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> I would prefer http://www.fudforum.org/ <http://www.fudforum.org/> that has good mailing list support, too.

Well, we appear to have completely opposite opinions on UI/usability. I took a look at fudforum and yeah, to my eyes it exemplifies the awful clutter that’s been a hallmark of web forums since before PHPBB. There’s so much visual noise it’s very hard to parse or to find anything. Clearly designed by a coder with a big hammer named “<table>”. I’m not a UI designer, but I’ve worked extensively with UI designers (I spent 15 years at Apple working on stuff like iChat and AppleScript) so I think I have some grounding in the field.

I do believe, though, that whatever solution swift.org <http://swift.org/> switches to needs to have good email support. That way the people who hate the web UI, or who just don’t prefer to use the web for discussions, can keep using email as we do today. This is perfectly feasible to do; again, groups.io <http://groups.io/> is a good example. 

Here my concern is that I have not found a way to configure Discourse to make its email notifications work well as a substitute for a mailing list. I have admin privileges on a Discourse installation run by my employer, so I’ve looked through the entire admin UI for ways to improve the emails, and some of the problems don’t seem fixable by tweaking settings.

At this point I’m going to shut up because it sounds like the decision has been made, and I don’t want to contribute to further bike-shedding.

—Jens
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