<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Using Apple Developer Forums would cause people to leave swift-evolution (a prediction). I don’t think they offer a good enough experience for quick discussions like mailing lists or Discourse do.<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">My question is: would we gain more people than we would lose in moving over to something like Discourse?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I don’t think a lot of people on here are grasping the high burden mailing lists place on people not familiar with them</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Brandon</div><div class=""><div class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Aug 3, 2016, at 10:02 PM, Paulo Faria via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" class="">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Exactly what I was going to say. Why not use Apple’s forum?<div class="">It’s there already. It’s just a matter of using it. Some are saying things like, the core team should be focused on working on the language, etc. That’s so obvious that it shouldn’t even be said. This is a fact, but a fact that has nothing to do with having a good communication medium. It’s just a matter of decision. The core team could decide we use apple’s forum instead of the mailing list, boom, done. If we need any extra features from the forum, it’s not gonna be the core team to deal with. It will be the people that are already responsible for the apple forum.</div><div class=""><br class=""><div class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Aug 3, 2016, at 6:47 AM, David Hart via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" class="">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">I did not have the time to counter all those points but I was going to and point that Discourse has a solution for nearly all of those. I would REALLY prefer having the mailing-list part of the discussion on Discourse.<div class=""><br class=""><div class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On 03 Aug 2016, at 07:46, Jacob Bandes-Storch via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" class="">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_extra"><div class=""><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="">I hope my replies aren't too curt — I don't want to pick a fight (any more than I did by starting this topic), but to explore how Discourse can serve these use cases. Feel free to re-rebut.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 3:03 PM, Brent Royal-Gordon <span dir="ltr" class=""><<a href="mailto:brent@architechies.com" target="_blank" class="">brent@architechies.com</a>></span> wrote:<br class=""></div></div></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><span class="gmail-"><br class="">
</span>I don't think enough has been said in favor of mailing lists. Some advantages for them:<br class="">
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1. Available on every platform.<br class=""></blockquote><div class="">Browsers too.</div><div class=""> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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2. Performant on every platform. (Discourse, for instance, struggles on Android.)<br class=""></blockquote><div class="">Browsers are heavily tuned for performance, and Discourse is a relatively lightweight site. If you prefer the performance of your email client, there's mailing list mode.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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3. Native on every platform.<br class=""></blockquote><div class="">Browsers too.</div><div class=""> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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4. Based on open standards with multiple implementations.<br class=""></blockquote><div class="">Browsers too. You may argue that the forum itself is too centralized, but Mailman is necessarily centralized too.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">And this isn't always a positive: formatting of styled, quoted, and even plain text is quite varied among email clients, so popular threads often end up looking like huge messes.</div><div class=""> <br class=""></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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5. Does not require you to proactively check swift-evolution.<br class=""></blockquote><div class="">Email notification settings, or full-on mailing list mode, or RSS, can solve this.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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6. Supports offline reading and drafting.<br class=""></blockquote><div class="">Mailing list mode or RSS / reply-by-email.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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7. Supports clients with alternate feature sets.<br class=""></blockquote><div class="">Discourse has RSS feeds and JSON APIs.</div><div class=""> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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8. Supports bot clients for both sending (like the CI bot) and receiving (like Gmane).<br class=""></blockquote><div class="">Discourse has <a href="https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-api-documentation/22706" class="">an API</a> which can be used for posting. It also supports <a href="https://github.com/discourse/try-bot/blob/master/plugin.rb" class="">bot-like plugins</a> which can respond to various events, although I imagine that requires self-hosting. External bots interested in receiving would probably need to poll RSS, or just make use of mailing list mode as a receive hook.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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9. Supports user-specific automatic filtering.<br class=""></blockquote><div class="">Topics and categories in Discourse each support a range of notification options from "watching" to "muted". My understanding is that these settings are respected by mailing list mode.</div><div class=""> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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10. Users can privately annotate messages.<br class=""></blockquote><div class="">Discourse has "bookmarks", basically a way of saving individual posts/replies for yourself. Users can also <a href="https://meta.discourse.org/t/support-multiple-new-topic-drafts/7263/15?u=jtbandes" class="">send themselves private messages</a> for note-taking purposes.</div><div class=""> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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11. Drafts and private messages are not visible to any central administrator.<br class=""></blockquote><div class="">I'm not sure whether Discourse drafts are saved on the server. <a href="https://meta.discourse.org/t/permission-changes-moderators-have-less/12522" class="">Moderators are restricted from viewing private messages</a>. Of course, you can always contact someone via other means.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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12. History is stored in a distributed fashion; there is no single point of failure that could wipe out swift-evolution's history.<br class=""></blockquote><div class="">This is a fair point. But: </div><div class="">- The Git repository of proposals is distributed.</div><div class="">- Discourse is as easily backed up as any other computer system: <a href="https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-automatic-backups-for-discourse/14855" class="">https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-automatic-backups-for-discourse/14855</a></div><div class="">- Users who would like a low-fidelity local copy for themselves can enable mailing list mode.</div><div class="">- Anyone is free to access/archive publicly accessible content using the APIs.</div><div class=""> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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13. Usually the medium of choice for large-scale, long-running open source projects.<br class=""></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Is that just because people already know how to use email? Is it because the projects are so long-running that email was the best/only choice when they started? I'm not sure anyone has done real academic research on the use of mailing lists in open source projects. If someone can find any, I'd be interested to read it.</div><div class=""> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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I could probably go on, but I'll stop here for now.<br class="">
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I would love to have a great web archive for swift-evolution—something with a really solid search function, good threading, and most of the other niceties of forums. It'd even be nice to have an upvote feature. But these are all things that you could do without taking swift-evolution off of email.</blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">This seems like status quo bias to me. It's just as valid to *start* with a great forum system, and build any desirable additional features on top, as it is to start with a mailing list and build additional features on top. (Discourse being open-source is a pretty big advantage in terms of the ability to add features.)</div></div></div></div>
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