On Mar 12, 2020, at 6:15 PM, Jens Alfke <j...@mooseyard.com> wrote: > > I strongly disagree with your using a homemade forum rather than something > like Discourse.
Unlike SQLite proper, the Fossil project accepts outside contributions without a whole lot of gatekeeping. I myself have made a few improvements to Fossil, including to its forum feature. > What's important is usability — following discussions The stock CSS for Fossil forums color threads with new posts differently. There’s message threading, and there’s email alerts on top of that so you can continue to use your preferred MUA to follow threads. What more do you need? > finding new content Fossil’s built-in message searching capabilities are likely as good as those in your mail reader or in a mailing list manager. And if you identify a lack, the person responsible for adding features to FTS5 is also the person you’re upset at for this change, so maybe he’ll be receptive to your wishes for improvement. > reading it …which you can continue to do in your mail reader. > and composing messages. What features do you need here? Most email messages are short, so while a browser’s textarea control isn’t super powerful, it’s usually sufficient. Between that and the power of Fossil flavored Markdown, I rarely find myself needing more power. And I say that as one who’s been using Fossil forums since their inception. > There's a reason many people cling to mailing lists as their preferred > messaging system: email clients have evolved for nearly 50 years to be good > messaging clients. I’d say it’s more because email is a lingua franca for online communication, one of the few truly federated mechanisms, beholden to no single corporation for its existence. And Fossil forums embraces email quite well on the outbound side. If you think you can solve the inbound side as well, Fossil has the beginnings of an SMTP server in it already. I think it’s a massive project, which explains why it’s unfinished, but it’s there for someone interested. > In a nutshell: by building a forum you're moving way outside your core > competency. It would be wiser to outsource this to a product that's been > built for this purpose by people who are really good at it. This isn’t brand new functionality. It’s been baking for most of two years. (The feature's approximate birthday is 2018-06-14.) > Personally, I don't have SQLite questions all that often. I hang out in the > mailing list because it's easy to follow it in my email client and it's > convenient to post and reply. …which you can still do with the new SQLite forum. > The forum, from my brief experience today, is really awkward. From my ~2 years of experience, it isn’t all that awkward. It’s not whizzy, but it is functional and useful. It’s worth noting that Fossil's forum feature also builds on several much older pieces of tech. At a low level, Fossil forums are just specialized applications of the pre-existing wiki code! Some of the stuff that underpins the forum feature goes back to its very roots. This isn’t something drh just hacked up last weekend. _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
