To add my two cents, I personally engage much more on communities using discourse or some modern Forum engines, than on those relying on mailing lists.
As far as browsing archives is concerned, I personally always find it painful to browse email archives to find relevant information. Maybe if you have been part of the community from day 1, and you have been storing all emails locally, then launching a search in your email client is convenient (but even then, the quality of your results will depend on the search implementation of your email client + what about if you're not using your regular computer). However, if you are an outsider looking for context that was discussed 2 years ago, even Couchdb's official archive website<https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/> does not have a search function. There may be a way but this is clearly not as user friendly than something like discourse. I would also note that beyond archive scenarios, one major benefit of tools like Discord that people often fail to verbalize is that they capture social dynamics around a topic/issue. You can see how many people viewed a topic, liked a post etc... It is so valuable to know that the piece of information you have found helped the original poster, or was "blessed" with a like by a senior member of the community. This also helps the archiving scenario since you have very helpful activity feeds, which also allow you to stay on top of your preferred communities quickly. If questions are redundant you can link to the previous topic easily or even merge topics. Referencing former discussions on emails is much more difficult and impractical. My observation is that people just get tired of answering the same question and ignore new posters or start replying with one-liners. So far I have never subscribed to email notifications on these platforms, I just visit the website and have no problem with that. Moreover something like Discourse even groups the topics that were discussed "since you last visited". Just sharing my experience since many people may be similar. ________________________________ De : Dave Cottlehuber <d...@skunkwerks.at> Envoyé : dimanche 15 mars 2020 14:36 À : dev@couchdb.apache.org <dev@couchdb.apache.org> Objet : Re: [DISCUSS] moving email lists to Discourse On Fri, 13 Mar 2020, at 14:35, Naomi Slater wrote: > apparently GitHub has discussions now. it's still in beta, but you can > specifically request it if you want it if you contact support, I think > > e.g., https://github.com/zeit/next.js/discussions > <https://github.com/zeit/next.js/discussions> interesting. > I'm interested to know what we think about this and how this > might/could fit into our plans for user support, discussion, etc. > > > On 13 Mar 2020, at 00:41, Arturo GARCIA-VARGAS <art...@ficuslabs.com> wrote: > > > > I'm sure Discourse is a fantastic thing (never used it!) but for us > > dinosaurs that still use Email it would be a bad move. > > > > Plain text rulez I concur. My 2c is that I have become a unix greybeard in habit, if not physical attributes. I feel that neither slack nor discourse facilitate being involved in multiple communities concurrently, they are actively hostile to it. I spent significantly less time in discourse/slack vs irc/email communities. The rust discourse, and others that I follow, truncate outbound emails, and also limit the numbers of outbound messages, effectively making it not really email, and forcing you to browse the site. This is significantly slower than churning through a stash of emails to catch up. That said, user convenience trumps developer satisfaction. If the flock is moving off mailing lists, then the shepherd should follow. A+ Dave
