On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 01:49:24PM +0100, Thom Brown wrote: > It introduces another point of entry to the community. There will be > people who are averse to mailing lists, and find forums more familiar > and accessible. Adding more traffic means more users involved in the > community. Not sure why this makes the lists less useful.
When we had the Usenet gateway, from time to time it broke in various slightly annoying ways. Those ways were a distraction on the list. I predict the same will happen here. Anyway, the way some issues were resolved with respect to Usenet might be instructive. The spam-prevention strategies in particular ought to be useful, because if you think spam on the web is bad, you should check out Usenet from five years ago. (It may now be exclusively spam, porn, and warez, for all I know, since I haven't had a Usenet feed for several years now.) > These aren't completely different styles of interaction either. It's > good form on our mailing list to bottom-post, which happens to be the > style on forums. That's not all there is to forums, though. Quite importantly, in a forum there are formatting conventions. Forum users will expect those things to be reproduced in the list in some way. But in plain ASCII text, there's not a good way to preserve such features. That will just frustrate everyone. > There are issues to be resolved before it could be accepted, such as > forcing plain text, maintaining conversations, importing existing > mailing list archives in and not introducing any loopholes for > spammers to abuse. Right. And those all seem to me to be hurdles too high to jump. Though if you're successful, I'll cheerfully concede I was wrong. (I predict that if you force forum users to stick to ASCII text only, you'll spend 20% of the time talking about how much the forum formatting rules suck.) > The alternative is to have a completely independant forum, which is > probably destined to fail as it has several times in the past, > especially since the core developers and main contributors exclusively > use the mailing list. At least this way they can be brought into a > forum transparently. Well, one simpleish answer would be to have a one-way feed from the mail list to the forum, so that people using the forum could see these other things on the list (without being able to post to the list unless they were willing to send mail). That way, their familiar search tools and so on would work on the mail archive, but the interactive portions would have to go on inside the forum itself. This is perhaps less ideal, but it opens a pinhole between the two interaction styles instead of trying to make two incommensurable styles of interaction commensurate. I don't feel strongly about any of this, note, and I'm sure not willing to do any work. I'm merely observing that there are at least spokes of this wheel that have been invented before. A -- Andrew Sullivan a...@crankycanuck.ca -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general