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


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