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 wrote: > > > On Jul 9, 2016, at 22:58 , Gabriel Scherer > 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/ > > > >