[Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[Gabriel Scherer]

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Armaël: Discourse looks like an interesting option. If we tried to setup a
Discourse instance for OCaml, would you be willing to act as a moderator
there?

The Rust people have experience with Discourse as their main user forum (I
just created a topic (
https://users.rust-lang.org/t/what-are-rusts-discourse-hosting-plans-and-time-requirement/6462
) to ask about the specifics of their hosting plan), and closer to home the
Unikernel community also adopted discourse:

  github issue about the move:
    https://github.com/Unikernel-Systems/unikernel.org/issues/25

  Discourse forum:
    https://devel.unikernel.org/

(I'm adding Amir Chaudhry, who organized the Unikernel, transition, to the
loop. He had excellent feedback when the ocamlbuild community asked similar
questions -- https://github.com/ocaml/ocamlbuild/issues/31 )

I would be ready to finance a six-month experiment of using Discourse for
the OCaml community, to see what it gives, but I'm not interested in doing
the setting-up and other administration work myself, so we would need to
have volunteers for that.

On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 9:03 AM, Armaël Guéneau <armael.gueneau@ens-lyon.fr>
wrote:

> Le 09/07/2016 à 00:18, Fabrice Le Fessant a écrit :
> > I have no time to go on IRC, so I don't really care about it, but I
> think that > we miss something in the middle between mailing-lists and IRC,
> which is a > forum that would be hosted on ocaml.org (ocaml.org/forum ?).
> I used to go on > some BB forums at some point, I am pretty sure we could
> use something like > that, or one of its more recent clones (but not a
> proprietary website). Such > forums are quite practical, as you can both
> monitor them to answer questions > immediately (à la IRC) without filling
> your inbox, and still be able to come > from time to time and look at
> former discussions.
>
> If there has to be something other than IRC and the mailing list, I
> personnally
> quite like the idea of a forum. The *BB things sure have an old-school
> look&feel, but discourse [1] looks nice, for example, and I think the rust
> people use it for their user forum [2] (and it is free software).
>
> I personnaly would be happy to help newcomers on such a forum. I'm also
> not so
> fond of IRC-like mediums: the density of useful and actual content is
> usually
> quite low (because of the informal aspect of the discussions), and not
> structured or easily searchable. It's not because you have access to the
> 500k+
> lines of backlog that the informations there are actually usable.
>
> — Armaël
>
> [1]: https://www.discourse.org/
> [2]: https://users.rust-lang.org/
>

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Re: [Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[Andreas Rossberg]

> On Jul 9, 2016, at 22:58 , Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Armaël: Discourse looks like an interesting option. If we tried to setup a Discourse instance for OCaml, would you be willing to act as a moderator there?

To paraphrase Dijkstra, IMHO email and mailing lists are an improvement over more “modern” forums in almost every way, once you get past the “flashiness” thing:

- participation without having to constantly log into yet another account (with potential tracking),
- all communication through the same tool/UI (that actually works), easy cross-communication and cross-quoting, archiving in one place, etc
- offline reading & writing,
- proper threading (Discourse sees its lack as a “feature"),
- no annoying gamification,
- open, standardised and guaranteed to still be around in 5 or 10 years from now.

Also, IME, email generally encourages a slower, more considerate and more comprehensive discussion style.

Discourse has an email gateway, but last time I looked, it wasn’t deemed very usable.

It would be sad to fragment the (not so huge) OCaml community just to hop onto the latest train in forum fashion, be it Discourse or the next thing. I’m sure we would lose some people on the way (happened with Rust). I’m less sure about the people we gonna win over that way.

/Andreas


> The Rust people have experience with Discourse as their main user forum (I just created a topic ( https://users.rust-lang.org/t/what-are-rusts-discourse-hosting-plans-and-time-requirement/6462 ) to ask about the specifics of their hosting plan), and closer to home the Unikernel community also adopted discourse:
>   
>   github issue about the move:
>     https://github.com/Unikernel-Systems/unikernel.org/issues/25
> 
>   Discourse forum:
>     https://devel.unikernel.org/
>   
> (I'm adding Amir Chaudhry, who organized the Unikernel, transition, to the loop. He had excellent feedback when the ocamlbuild community asked similar questions -- https://github.com/ocaml/ocamlbuild/issues/31 )
> 
> I would be ready to finance a six-month experiment of using Discourse for the OCaml community, to see what it gives, but I'm not interested in doing the setting-up and other administration work myself, so we would need to have volunteers for that.
> 
> On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 9:03 AM, Armaël Guéneau <armael.gueneau@ens-lyon.fr> wrote:
> Le 09/07/2016 à 00:18, Fabrice Le Fessant a écrit :
> > I have no time to go on IRC, so I don't really care about it, but I think that
> > we miss something in the middle between mailing-lists and IRC, which is a
> > forum that would be hosted on 
> ocaml.org (ocaml.org/forum
>  ?). I used to go on
> > some BB forums at some point, I am pretty sure we could use something like
> > that, or one of its more recent clones (but not a proprietary website). Such
> > forums are quite practical, as you can both monitor them to answer questions
> > immediately (à la IRC) without filling your inbox, and still be able to come
> > from time to time and look at former discussions.
> 
> 
> If there has to be something other than IRC and the mailing list, I personnally
> quite like the idea of a forum. The *BB things sure have an old-school
> look&feel, but discourse [1] looks nice, for example, and I think the rust
> people use it for their user forum [2] (and it is free software).
> 
> I personnaly would be happy to help newcomers on such a forum. I'm also not so
> fond of IRC-like mediums: the density of useful and actual content is usually
> quite low (because of the informal aspect of the discussions), and not
> structured or easily searchable. It's not because you have access to the 500k+
> lines of backlog that the informations there are actually usable.
> 
> — Armaël
> 
> [1]: https://www.discourse.org/
> [2]: https://users.rust-lang.org/
> 

Re: [Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[SP]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 09:21:48AM +0200, Andreas Rossberg wrote:
>To paraphrase Dijkstra, IMHO email and mailing lists are an improvement over more “modern” forums in almost every way, once you get past the “flashiness” thing:
>- participation without having to constantly log into yet another account (with potential tracking),
>- all communication through the same tool/UI (that actually works), easy cross-communication and cross-quoting, archiving in one place, etc
> [..]
>- no annoying gamification,
>- open, standardised and guaranteed to still be around in 5 or 10 years from now.
>Also, IME, email generally encourages a slower, more considerate and more comprehensive discussion style.

Exactly. Earlier in the discussion I expressed a similar opinion (didn't
expand as much) but it was ignored and they are plodding on. I hope your
message won't be ignored either.

>Discourse has an email gateway, but last time I looked, it wasn’t deemed very usable.

Mailman 3 adds a web interface for those who prefer it. I think the
OCaml lists at Inria don't use Mailman though.

>It would be sad to fragment the (not so huge) OCaml community just to
>hop onto the latest train in forum fashion, be it Discourse or the next
>thing. I’m sure we would lose some people on the way (happened with
>Rust). I’m less sure about the people we gonna win over that way.

I concur. Again, I hope this time around this case won't be ignored.

-- 
	SP

Re: [Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[Anthony Tavener]

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I agree that email/list is better for the reasons Andreas listed...

However, one issue (pro and con) with the mailing list is that posting has
a barrier-to-entry with the knowledge that your are broadcasting to many
people. This is great for avoiding trivia, and keeping the signal-to-noise
ratio high...

But it might be good to have a place for more trivial or narrow-audience
topics. So people can banter about their projects or problems they
encounter which they don't deem worthy of trumpeting "Here ye! Here ye!"
for. Sometimes I want to waste some time reading about OCaml stuff... but
reddit and email have nothing new. :) But I'm also glad these aren't choked
with random crap either. A forum-like format reduces the
wideband-broadcast, providing some compartmentalization, and the step for a
reader to actively go looking. And if something important/interesting to
the wider community flares up in such a place, *then* it can be referenced
on this list, or reddit.

I, too, would not want to fragment this tiny community. But we seem to lack
a place for more voluminous banter, which might have the opposite effect:
of livening things up.

I'm not arguing for Discourse necessarily (I haven't looked into it at
all), but in general: that a forum might be a useful part of
community-building. Or do we have something already which I've missed?


On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 4:47 AM, SP <sp@orbitalfox.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 09:21:48AM +0200, Andreas Rossberg wrote:
>
>> To paraphrase Dijkstra, IMHO email and mailing lists are an improvement
>> over more “modern” forums in almost every way, once you get past the
>> “flashiness” thing:
>> - participation without having to constantly log into yet another account
>> (with potential tracking),
>> - all communication through the same tool/UI (that actually works), easy
>> cross-communication and cross-quoting, archiving in one place, etc
>> [..]
>> - no annoying gamification,
>> - open, standardised and guaranteed to still be around in 5 or 10 years
>> from now.
>> Also, IME, email generally encourages a slower, more considerate and more
>> comprehensive discussion style.
>>
>
> Exactly. Earlier in the discussion I expressed a similar opinion (didn't
> expand as much) but it was ignored and they are plodding on. I hope your
> message won't be ignored either.
>
> Discourse has an email gateway, but last time I looked, it wasn’t deemed
>> very usable.
>>
>
> Mailman 3 adds a web interface for those who prefer it. I think the
> OCaml lists at Inria don't use Mailman though.
>
> It would be sad to fragment the (not so huge) OCaml community just to
>> hop onto the latest train in forum fashion, be it Discourse or the next
>> thing. I’m sure we would lose some people on the way (happened with
>> Rust). I’m less sure about the people we gonna win over that way.
>>
>
> I concur. Again, I hope this time around this case won't be ignored.
>
> --
>         SP
>
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>

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Re: [Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[Gabriel Scherer]

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Thanks Andreas, I think those are valid points.

On the other hand, I suspect that a forum may be complementary with a
mailing-list instead of replacing it. Armaël wrote:

> I personnaly would be happy to help newcomers on a forum.

and I think we should recognize that the caml-beginners list is a failure.

  https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ocaml_beginners/conversations/messages

Some people use it, but in numbers that are fairly small compared to the
number of people that discover OCaml on a given time period (there are like
3 to 10 questions a month). It is sensibly less active than, say,
StackOverflow

  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ocaml

and its "yahoo group" interface is horrible (I don't know why people are
enthusiastic about Google Groups either, but well).

Any beginner-level discussion is ill-served by caml-list, and currently the
only choice I think are IRC and StackOverflow, the first being fairly
unstructured and the second being completely over the top in term of
rigidity and blind application of dubious policies.

I don't yet have a super-good idea of how to clearly delineate "beginner
questions" and "stuff that would be a good fit for caml-list", but I think
having a clear picture there could be an answer to your concern.

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 3:21 AM, Andreas Rossberg <rossberg@mpi-sws.org>
wrote:

>
> > On Jul 9, 2016, at 22:58 , Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Armaël: Discourse looks like an interesting option. If we tried to setup
> a Discourse instance for OCaml, would you be willing to act as a moderator
> there?
>
> To paraphrase Dijkstra, IMHO email and mailing lists are an improvement
> over more “modern” forums in almost every way, once you get past the
> “flashiness” thing:
>
> - participation without having to constantly log into yet another account
> (with potential tracking),
> - all communication through the same tool/UI (that actually works), easy
> cross-communication and cross-quoting, archiving in one place, etc
> - offline reading & writing,
> - proper threading (Discourse sees its lack as a “feature"),
> - no annoying gamification,
> - open, standardised and guaranteed to still be around in 5 or 10 years
> from now.
>
> Also, IME, email generally encourages a slower, more considerate and more
> comprehensive discussion style.
>
> Discourse has an email gateway, but last time I looked, it wasn’t deemed
> very usable.
>
> It would be sad to fragment the (not so huge) OCaml community just to hop
> onto the latest train in forum fashion, be it Discourse or the next thing.
> I’m sure we would lose some people on the way (happened with Rust). I’m
> less sure about the people we gonna win over that way.
>
> /Andreas
>
>
> > The Rust people have experience with Discourse as their main user forum
> (I just created a topic (
> https://users.rust-lang.org/t/what-are-rusts-discourse-hosting-plans-and-time-requirement/6462
> ) to ask about the specifics of their hosting plan), and closer to home the
> Unikernel community also adopted discourse:
> >
> >   github issue about the move:
> >     https://github.com/Unikernel-Systems/unikernel.org/issues/25
> >
> >   Discourse forum:
> >     https://devel.unikernel.org/
> >
> > (I'm adding Amir Chaudhry, who organized the Unikernel, transition, to
> the loop. He had excellent feedback when the ocamlbuild community asked
> similar questions -- https://github.com/ocaml/ocamlbuild/issues/31 )
> >
> > I would be ready to finance a six-month experiment of using Discourse
> for the OCaml community, to see what it gives, but I'm not interested in
> doing the setting-up and other administration work myself, so we would need
> to have volunteers for that.
> >
> > On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 9:03 AM, Armaël Guéneau <
> armael.gueneau@ens-lyon.fr> wrote:
> > Le 09/07/2016 à 00:18, Fabrice Le Fessant a écrit :
> > > I have no time to go on IRC, so I don't really care about it, but I
> think that
> > > we miss something in the middle between mailing-lists and IRC, which
> is a
> > > forum that would be hosted on
> > ocaml.org (ocaml.org/forum
> >  ?). I used to go on
> > > some BB forums at some point, I am pretty sure we could use something
> like
> > > that, or one of its more recent clones (but not a proprietary
> website). Such
> > > forums are quite practical, as you can both monitor them to answer
> questions
> > > immediately (à la IRC) without filling your inbox, and still be able
> to come
> > > from time to time and look at former discussions.
> >
> >
> > If there has to be something other than IRC and the mailing list, I
> personnally
> > quite like the idea of a forum. The *BB things sure have an old-school
> > look&feel, but discourse [1] looks nice, for example, and I think the
> rust
> > people use it for their user forum [2] (and it is free software).
> >
> > I personnaly would be happy to help newcomers on such a forum. I'm also
> not so
> > fond of IRC-like mediums: the density of useful and actual content is
> usually
> > quite low (because of the informal aspect of the discussions), and not
> > structured or easily searchable. It's not because you have access to the
> 500k+
> > lines of backlog that the informations there are actually usable.
> >
> > — Armaël
> >
> > [1]: https://www.discourse.org/
> > [2]: https://users.rust-lang.org/
> >
>
>

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Re: [Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[Dean Thompson]

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I see another big difficulty with this mailing list: as a newcomer, it was essentially impossible for me to work back through the archives for this mailing list to understand the main issues being discussed, the main leaders and participants in the community, and the main points of view. The archive page (https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list) is intimidating. Once I got past that first impression, I still found the navigation very difficult.

Those were criticisms, and I have more below. But let me be clear: I *love* OCaml. I am deeply, deeply impressed by the insight and technical excellence of the OCaml community and ecosystem. I am just hoping that by being frank about my experiences as a newcomer, I can contribute to making it even better.

My general experience so far, as I try to learn OCaml and become a constructive member of the community, is that I encounter fragmented and conflicting advice on most major topics. The good news toward unification is that ocaml.org is at the top of the Google results. (At least, for me it is.) But, because I began reading Real World OCaml (a wonderful book!) before I ever did that Google search, when I did focus on ocaml.org, I was knocked off balance by how different its world of OCaml seemed to be.

I’ll take a minute to be more specific: When I see ocaml.org as a beginner, I personally gravitate toward Documentation/Manual. Each part of that manual (http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/) is in conflict with Real World OCaml. The most obvious example is that “The core library” and “The standard library" in the manual are very different from "The Core Standard Library” in Real World OCaml. But many other things are also different. Even the language looks different: some capabilities like first class modules that are presented in Real World OCaml as simply part of the language (although advanced), are presented in the manual as “Language extensions”. But as I worked my way through the language extensions in the manual, I saw lots of capabilities that I don’t think are in Real World OCaml.

Which brings me back to the topic at hand: mailing lists, forums, etc. When I encounter what seems like conflicting information, I start looking for the community discussions that would help me understand what consensus exists, plus the main dissenting viewpoints. Starting from ocaml.org, that takes me to the archives for this mailing list. Which I personally found unhelpful.

Dean

> On Jul 10, 2016, at 8:25 AM, Anthony Tavener <anthony.tavener@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I agree that email/list is better for the reasons Andreas listed...
> 
> However, one issue (pro and con) with the mailing list is that posting has a barrier-to-entry with the knowledge that your are broadcasting to many people. This is great for avoiding trivia, and keeping the signal-to-noise ratio high...
> 
> But it might be good to have a place for more trivial or narrow-audience topics. So people can banter about their projects or problems they encounter which they don't deem worthy of trumpeting "Here ye! Here ye!" for. Sometimes I want to waste some time reading about OCaml stuff... but reddit and email have nothing new. :) But I'm also glad these aren't choked with random crap either. A forum-like format reduces the wideband-broadcast, providing some compartmentalization, and the step for a reader to actively go looking. And if something important/interesting to the wider community flares up in such a place, *then* it can be referenced on this list, or reddit.
> 
> I, too, would not want to fragment this tiny community. But we seem to lack a place for more voluminous banter, which might have the opposite effect: of livening things up.
> 
> I'm not arguing for Discourse necessarily (I haven't looked into it at all), but in general: that a forum might be a useful part of community-building. Or do we have something already which I've missed?
> 
> 
> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 4:47 AM, SP <sp@orbitalfox.com <mailto:sp@orbitalfox.com>> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 09:21:48AM +0200, Andreas Rossberg wrote:
> To paraphrase Dijkstra, IMHO email and mailing lists are an improvement over more “modern” forums in almost every way, once you get past the “flashiness” thing:
> - participation without having to constantly log into yet another account (with potential tracking),
> - all communication through the same tool/UI (that actually works), easy cross-communication and cross-quoting, archiving in one place, etc
> [..]
> - no annoying gamification,
> - open, standardised and guaranteed to still be around in 5 or 10 years from now.
> Also, IME, email generally encourages a slower, more considerate and more comprehensive discussion style.
> 
> Exactly. Earlier in the discussion I expressed a similar opinion (didn't
> expand as much) but it was ignored and they are plodding on. I hope your
> message won't be ignored either.
> 
> Discourse has an email gateway, but last time I looked, it wasn’t deemed very usable.
> 
> Mailman 3 adds a web interface for those who prefer it. I think the
> OCaml lists at Inria don't use Mailman though.
> 
> It would be sad to fragment the (not so huge) OCaml community just to
> hop onto the latest train in forum fashion, be it Discourse or the next
> thing. I’m sure we would lose some people on the way (happened with
> Rust). I’m less sure about the people we gonna win over that way.
> 
> I concur. Again, I hope this time around this case won't be ignored.
> 
> -- 
>         SP
> 
> 
> -- 
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list <https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list>
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners>
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs <http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs>
> 


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Re: [Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[Glen Mével]

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Andreas Rossberg a écrit (le 10/07/2016 à 09:21) :

> To paraphrase Dijkstra, IMHO email and mailing lists are an
> improvement over more “modern” forums in almost every way, once you
> get past the “flashiness” thing:
>
> - participation without having to constantly log into yet another
>   account (with potential tracking),
> - all communication through the same tool/UI (that actually works),
>   easy cross-communication and cross-quoting, archiving in one place,
>   etc
> - offline reading & writing,
> - proper threading (Discourse sees its lack as a “feature"),
> - no annoying gamification,
> - open, standardised and guaranteed to still be around in 5 or 10
>   years from now.

i fully agree with all this. however, there is one single feature that i
miss with email and newsgroup: the ability to edit a message after it
was sent. sadly, by the nature of those protocols this can’t be fixed,
and to me this is the single stuff that makes the web‐2.0‐based
solutions (forums and the like) unavoidable. [ other missing features,
available in more recent technologies, are either superfluous
(avatars?), or tied to contents (redaction in a Markdown‐like format,
syntax highlighting…), thus can be circumvented. ]

moreover, i second Anthony & others in saying that the mailing‐list
format somehow refrains people from participating. it may be good for
the essential discussions, but otherwise limits beginner questions and
general community exchanges.

plus the current mailing lists lack visiblity, as pointed out before.

for these reasons i believe too that a forum‐like solution may prove
valuable. it may allow discussions to grow freely, and as a side‐effect
would increase the visibility of the community.

to that purpose, Discourse may be the less bad solution, for it
	— being open‐source,
	— being well‐known, by which i mean that:
		(1) it is a modern, trendy solution that would refresh
		    the image of the community as depicted by Duane,
		    and may attract newcomers, [*]
		(2) the interface would look familiar,
	— gaining from a wider adoption more potential for becoming a
	  standard in lieu of the wild forum solutions, as a successor
	  for, say, newsgroups.
	— plus i see on its homepage than it can use OpenID, which
	  partially addresses your point about logging in (not the
	  tracking issue, though…).

the drawback is, as you pointed out, the absence of interoperability
with external clients and protocols (run a browser+JS or die). however,
as it is open‐source, it should be possible to ask for improvement of at
least the email gateway — even if a good email gateway still wouldn’t be
satisfying from that perspective. also note that Discourse apparently is
a mailing‐list manager too, so we may conveniently mirror this list in
our new forum; this would help avoiding community fragmentation as you
fear it.

-- 
Glen Mével

[*]: well, you should ask a more hype-sensitive person on that point.


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Re: [Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[Armaël Guéneau]

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Le 09/07/2016 à 22:58, Gabriel Scherer a écrit :
> Armaël: Discourse looks like an interesting option. If we tried to setup a Discourse instance for OCaml, would you be willing to act as a moderator there?

Yes, sure.


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Re: [Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[Hendrik Boom]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 06:10:27PM +0200, Glen Mével wrote:
> Andreas Rossberg a écrit (le 10/07/2016 à 09:21) :
> 
> > To paraphrase Dijkstra, IMHO email and mailing lists are an
> > improvement over more “modern” forums in almost every way, once you
> > get past the “flashiness” thing:
> >
> > - participation without having to constantly log into yet another
> >   account (with potential tracking),
> > - all communication through the same tool/UI (that actually works),
> >   easy cross-communication and cross-quoting, archiving in one place,
> >   etc
> > - offline reading & writing,
> > - proper threading (Discourse sees its lack as a “feature"),
> > - no annoying gamification,
> > - open, standardised and guaranteed to still be around in 5 or 10
> >   years from now.
> 
> i fully agree with all this. however, there is one single feature that i
> miss with email and newsgroup: the ability to edit a message after it
> was sent. sadly, by the nature of those protocols this can’t be fixed,
> and to me this is the single stuff that makes the web‐2.0‐based
> solutions (forums and the like) unavoidable. [ other missing features,
> available in more recent technologies, are either superfluous
> (avatars?), or tied to contents (redaction in a Markdown‐like format,
> syntax highlighting…), thus can be circumvented. ]

THis in one thing that google plus allows.  However, I find searching 
for anything on google plus is an exercise in futility.

-- hendrik

Re: [Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[Stanislav Artemkin]

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JFYI:

They offer free Discourse forum hosting for open source github projects.
http://blog.discourse.org/2016/03/free-discourse-forum-hosting-for-community-friendly-github-projects/


On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 12:31 AM, Hendrik Boom <hendrik@topoi.pooq.com>
wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 06:10:27PM +0200, Glen Mével wrote:
> > Andreas Rossberg a écrit (le 10/07/2016 à 09:21) :
> >
> > > To paraphrase Dijkstra, IMHO email and mailing lists are an
> > > improvement over more “modern” forums in almost every way, once you
> > > get past the “flashiness” thing:
> > >
> > > - participation without having to constantly log into yet another
> > >   account (with potential tracking),
> > > - all communication through the same tool/UI (that actually works),
> > >   easy cross-communication and cross-quoting, archiving in one place,
> > >   etc
> > > - offline reading & writing,
> > > - proper threading (Discourse sees its lack as a “feature"),
> > > - no annoying gamification,
> > > - open, standardised and guaranteed to still be around in 5 or 10
> > >   years from now.
> >
> > i fully agree with all this. however, there is one single feature that i
> > miss with email and newsgroup: the ability to edit a message after it
> > was sent. sadly, by the nature of those protocols this can’t be fixed,
> > and to me this is the single stuff that makes the web‐2.0‐based
> > solutions (forums and the like) unavoidable. [ other missing features,
> > available in more recent technologies, are either superfluous
> > (avatars?), or tied to contents (redaction in a Markdown‐like format,
> > syntax highlighting…), thus can be circumvented. ]
>
> THis in one thing that google plus allows.  However, I find searching
> for anything on google plus is an exercise in futility.
>
> -- hendrik
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>

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