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> I'm not sure I'd recommend mailing lists in 2018, since they're simply less convenient for the average user than a good forum might be. I would definitely re

> I'm not sure I'd recommend mailing lists in 2018, since they're simply less convenient for the average user than a good forum might be. I would definitely recommend mailing lists in 2018, because they're much more convenient for the average user than a forum. If a user is extremely interested in a single project, then specialized software makes sense. But most people have lives beyond the single project - a mailing list makes it easy to funnel all that stuff into one place. Google groups and similar make it quite easy to set one up.

lmm 8y ago
> If a user is extremely interested in a single project, then specialized software makes sense. But most people have lives beyond the single project - a mailing list makes it easy to funnel all that stuff into one place. This is backwards. Unless someone is deeply involved in a single project, they don't want to sign up to a mailing list and have it flood their inbox (yes, I'm sure you have a sophisticated filtering system that separates out mailing list messages, but typical users don't). Yes you don't want to require users to install a custom executable, but a web forum that uses one of the handful of familiar packages for such will work great.
- berti 8y ago
  It really depends on the types of people you wish to attract. Obviously this is very subjective but I've always found mailing list discussions to be of noticeably higher quality than forum discussions. If your topic is a technical one then a mailing list makes sense, whereas a support area for average Joe really wants to be a forum (actually, Facebook groups seem to have taken over a lot of the area previously carved out by forums, and the standard of discourse is lower again).
  - u801e 8y ago
    A lot of web forums lack proper threading implementation (other than a flat thread descended from the original post). Hacker News and reddit do implement threads, but make it difficult to see new posts when you refresh (though reddit does mark them if you have "reddit gold").
u801e 8y ago
> I would definitely recommend mailing lists in 2018 I'm curious as to why setting up a newsgroup (on usenet) or setting up a private news server (with public read access and account required post access) was never the standard way to communicate for open source projects. The advantage newsgroups have over email is that it makes browsing archives of the list much easier, and they can be used just as easily with a mail/news client.
- dwheeler 8y ago
  Historically they were. CVS was originally posted to 'comp.sources.unix', for example. I think the fundamental problem is spammers. It's hard to kick off misbehaving users from usenet. Spanmers are trouble elsewhere too, but there are more tools to counter them. In short, spammers are why we can't have (some) nice things.
  - u801e 8y ago
    > I think the fundamental problem is spammers. It's hard to kick off misbehaving users from usenet. I know that usenet has the concept of moderated groups. I don't know whether managing one would be more time consuming compared to an email list. Based on what I see in the git mailing list (via gmane), there is a significant amount of spam that makes it through, but most people have set their filters to handle that.

lmm 8y ago

> If a user is extremely interested in a single project, then specialized software makes sense. But most people have lives beyond the single project - a mailing list makes it easy to funnel all that stuff into one place. This is backwards. Unless someone is deeply involved in a single project, they don't want to sign up to a mailing list and have it flood their inbox (yes, I'm sure you have a sophisticated filtering system that separates out mailing list messages, but typical users don't). Yes you don't want to require users to install a custom executable, but a web forum that uses one of the handful of familiar packages for such will work great.

berti 8y ago
It really depends on the types of people you wish to attract. Obviously this is very subjective but I've always found mailing list discussions to be of noticeably higher quality than forum discussions. If your topic is a technical one then a mailing list makes sense, whereas a support area for average Joe really wants to be a forum (actually, Facebook groups seem to have taken over a lot of the area previously carved out by forums, and the standard of discourse is lower again).
- u801e 8y ago
  A lot of web forums lack proper threading implementation (other than a flat thread descended from the original post). Hacker News and reddit do implement threads, but make it difficult to see new posts when you refresh (though reddit does mark them if you have "reddit gold").

u801e 8y ago

> I would definitely recommend mailing lists in 2018 I'm curious as to why setting up a newsgroup (on usenet) or setting up a private news server (with public read access and account required post access) was never the standard way to communicate for open source projects. The advantage newsgroups have over email is that it makes browsing archives of the list much easier, and they can be used just as easily with a mail/news client.

dwheeler 8y ago
Historically they were. CVS was originally posted to 'comp.sources.unix', for example. I think the fundamental problem is spammers. It's hard to kick off misbehaving users from usenet. Spanmers are trouble elsewhere too, but there are more tools to counter them. In short, spammers are why we can't have (some) nice things.
- u801e 8y ago
  > I think the fundamental problem is spammers. It's hard to kick off misbehaving users from usenet. I know that usenet has the concept of moderated groups. I don't know whether managing one would be more time consuming compared to an email list. Based on what I see in the git mailing list (via gmane), there is a significant amount of spam that makes it through, but most people have set their filters to handle that.