On Sat, 11 Dec 2021 10:01:44 +0000, Chris Green <c...@isbd.net> wrote: > On Fri, Dec 10, 2021 at 08:21:29PM -0600, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
Not that I have any problem with e-mail discussion lists, but I have thoughts to offer in response to a couple of specific points. > > The 'unforgiving' nature is because it is e-mail. Once it is out > > there, it is out there. No changes are possible as the transmission > > has already occurred and is fully completed. > > > > Thankfully one *cannot* edit an e-mail after sending. In the general case, I agree that it would be *very bad* if one could edit an email after sending it. In terms of tools for technical discussions in particular, though, I think a "version-controlled forum" approach does a decent job of offering the best of both worlds: It puts the current state of discussion all in one place that's easy to read without having to parse 'n' levels of quoted fragments and seek out entire separate documents to see their context and so forth... But! Posters can't rewrite history, because any post that's been edited is flagged as such and decorated with a link to a chain of commits so anyone can view diffs and see what was changed when. > I am on far too many (mostly software) discussion lists to even > possibly contemplate them moving to forums. With E-Mail everything > arrives in my mail program (sorted into separate places for each > list), if they were forums I'd have to got to (more than 60) different > web pages and log in on each to see postings. Wouldn't a decent RSS aggregator provide very much that same unified and sorted "inbox" experience for discussions conducted in web forums? Admittedly one still has to log in to *reply*, leading us to the hot mess that is authentication on the web (which can be worked around fairly painlessly via a password manager with good browser integration). Again, I'm not particularly advocating for Gnucash discussions to move to a web forum or what-have-you, I just find the question fascinating. In my opinion, the hardest objection to address is the overhead, both in hosting costs and administration time/effort. There's also the fact that a forum is much more vulnerable to the whole record being lost if the server admin disappears without handing over the keys to a successor, but that risk could be mitigated fairly effectively by having the contents synced to a public repo on Github or similar. I know that approach is popular for static sites, and *in theory* I think a version-controlled forum platform should be conducive to this setup, but I don't know whether such a thing is available in practice. Cheers! -Chris _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
