Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> I... don't understand how you reached that conclusion.
>
> My current understanding is:
> * Matthew posted about a number of issues / concerns with mailing lists.
> These concerns are completely 100% unrelated to our current list
> infrastructure. If we had the very latest mailman3 from upstream running
> smoothly... it would still be a mailing list and it would really have
> almost all of the same concerns.
>
> I completely understand where smooge is coming from here.
Well, I see two (almost orthogonal) lines of argumentation here:
* Matthew and others have proposed moving off the mailing list due to
alleged shortcomings that mailing lists have by design. The issue is that
this misses that Discourse has much worse shortcomings by design. (And "by
design" is usually synonymous with "unfixable".)
* Smooge has brought up that the mailing list has in his view been so badly
neglected over the last few years that it will have to be replaced anyway,
no matter whether the replacement is actually better or worse.
> Am I frustrated at the current state of our mailing list infrastructre?
> Oh so very much.
> Do I hope we can make it better?
> Oh so very much.
I would hope so too.
> Anyhow, I 100% disagree with you that this is 'a farce'.
> I think it's been useful, I think we have gotten:
>
> * More information on interacting with discussion via email and if it
> will meet the needs of existing devel folks.
> * A sense of people who will probibly not want to participate at all,
> even via an email interface.
> * Some more use cases mailing lists provide that we should consider a
> way to provide if we move more things to discussion (example, I think
> some kind of better/easier public archive for drive by contributors and
> those that need to look back in history would be good)
> * Some suggestions for improvements we can ask discourse folks to make
> to make more people happy.
>
> The next steps here would be for Matthew to ask fesco about moving
> changes discussions over to discuss and them to vote/consider that.
> After that, I hope we can fix some of the issues identified here before
> we do anything further to move more discussions over there.
Do you not see my point here? You have gotten a sizable amount of feedback
pointing out showstoppers that make Discourse anywhere from impractical to
unusable for several existing contributors, many of which are by design and
will never be fixed, or at least require a lot of coding that nobody is
signing up for (e.g., an NNTP gateway, plus, that will also suffer from some
of the core limitations of the e-mail notification system, e.g., not picking
up edits (unless maybe if the gateway "cancels" the post and resends the
edited version? But NNTP post cancellation is not universally supported)).
Yet, you are still set on pushing this change forward and already discussing
the next steps (FESCo vote, "fix[ing] some of the issues" (but you will
never be able to fix all of them because several are by design),
deployment). That, in my view, makes the RFC thread a farce, because the
option that ought to be the default (keep the status quo) appears to not
even be under discussion.
> I'll note that we just released Fedora 38... and the users mailing list
> has had a increase in posts. It had like 60-70 in the last week.
> The askfedora category in discussion had more than that overnight last
> night. It's pretty dramatic. Granted this could be due to us advertising
> that as the way to get help, and users asking questions aren't the same
> as developers, but still... It's a LOT more interaction.
It is certainly both: end users (as opposed to developers) are used to web
forums, and of course if you link to the forum everywhere and the mailing
list is hidden behind several clicks and has a more complicated signup
process, people will choose the forum.
Kevin Kofler
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