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I’ve looked at mailing lists for major, successful open source projects and you may be right. I like using Wikitech-L for Mediawiki. Some communities miss out o
by mch82 5y ago
I’ve looked at mailing lists for major, successful open source projects and you may be right. I like using Wikitech-L for Mediawiki. Some communities miss out on the potential of mailing lists because they implement the distribution list aspect without taking the additional step of implementing the browsable archival website. The archive is important because it lets late joiners find and participate in discussions.
People love to say email is a bad technology, but my hypothesis is that other messaging tools have succeeded because people use email improperly. Email is a highly manual medium and degrades rapidly unless people use it well. When people behave selfishly or rush (lazy subject line changes, reverse chronological messages, lazy quoting & replies written deep in old messages, off subject replies, etc.) email gets hard to read.
- Miraste 5y ago> Email is a highly manual medium and degrades rapidly unless people use it well. I'd argue that is a bad technology, at least for a general-use tool. I admit that I don't use mailing lists but I don't see how they have any advantages over a well-implemented forum. Trying to run a project over email and building an archival service to cope with it seems like a reversal of priorities.
- mch82 5y agoI don’t have a strong point of view yet. Linux [1] and Mediawiki [2] are two communities finding success with email lists. In those examples, the list archives can be read like a forum. Replies must be sent by email. It seems like the archive browser could benefit from a UX upgrade. [1]: http://vger.kernel.org/ http://vger.kernel.org/ [2]: https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mailing_lists https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mailing_lists