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

["Glen Mével" <glen.mevel@crans.org>]

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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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