So, my opinion on email vs. web forum is that it is comes down to freedom vs. lock-in. With mailing lists (and Usenet), messages are distributed in a more-or-less well-defined format, and users are able to choose clients, filtering, etc. to suit their use patterns. Sometimes people do novel things that help them handle volume, find and track topics they are interested in, etc. With a web forum, users are limited to consuming content in the way the forum developer created, as chosen to be applied by the system managers. Rarely do users have any control over how they access the content, and they still only can control it in the way the developers thought of, implemented, tested, and continue to support. I've used web forums where a function I used regularly went away with an upgrade because the developers didn't think enough people used them and didn't want to support them anymore. Now, that freedom to do as you please has kind of fallen by the wayside on the Internet in general; personal blogs went to hosted blogs (with more uniform interfaces) and then on to mass-hosted social media (with an interface decided entirely by the company running it). So maybe I'm just old-fashioned that way and not enough other people care. I'll admit up front that I haven't checked out Discourse yet. However, I haven't seen before anything that handles the way I consume email, especially mailing lists. I'll keep selected messages of a thread around for later reference, flag messages so they'll be highlighted when I open a folder in the future, filter out certain keywords or posters on rare occasions, and more - and that's just off the top of my head. Also, I follow a bunch of different mailing lists. If they all were web forums, I'd have a bunch of different interfaces to deal with, sites to visit, functionality to learn, etc., instead of my single mail client that I can tweak to my personal use patterns and can bring it all together. -- Chris Adams <linux@xxxxxxxxxxx> _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
