Re: forums.postgresql.com.au - Mailing list pgsql-general

On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 01:49:24PM +0100, Thom Brown wrote:

> It introduces another point of entry to the community.  There will be
> people who are averse to mailing lists, and find forums more familiar
> and accessible.  Adding more traffic means more users involved in the
> community.  Not sure why this makes the lists less useful.

When we had the Usenet gateway, from time to time it broke in various
slightly annoying ways.  Those ways were a distraction on the list.  I
predict the same will happen here.  Anyway, the way some issues were
resolved with respect to Usenet might be instructive.  The
spam-prevention strategies in particular ought to be useful, because
if you think spam on the web is bad, you should check out Usenet from
five years ago.  (It may now be exclusively spam, porn, and warez, for
all I know, since I haven't had a Usenet feed for several years now.)

> These aren't completely different styles of interaction either.  It's
> good form on our mailing list to bottom-post, which happens to be the
> style on forums.

That's not all there is to forums, though.  Quite importantly, in a
forum there are formatting conventions.  Forum users will expect those
things to be reproduced in the list in some way.  But in plain ASCII
text, there's not a good way to preserve such features.  That will
just frustrate everyone.

> There are issues to be resolved before it could be accepted, such as
> forcing plain text, maintaining conversations, importing existing
> mailing list archives in and not introducing any loopholes for
> spammers to abuse.

Right.  And those all seem to me to be hurdles too high to jump.
Though if you're successful, I'll cheerfully concede I was wrong.  (I
predict that if you force forum users to stick to ASCII text only,
you'll spend 20% of the time talking about how much the forum
formatting rules suck.)

> The alternative is to have a completely independant forum, which is
> probably destined to fail as it has several times in the past,
> especially since the core developers and main contributors exclusively
> use the mailing list.  At least this way they can be brought into a
> forum transparently.

Well, one simpleish answer would be to have a one-way feed from the
mail list to the forum, so that people using the forum could see these
other things on the list (without being able to post to the list
unless they were willing to send mail).  That way, their familiar
search tools and so on would work on the mail archive, but the
interactive portions would have to go on inside the forum itself.
This is perhaps less ideal, but it opens a pinhole between the two
interaction styles instead of trying to make two incommensurable
styles of interaction commensurate.

I don't feel strongly about any of this, note, and I'm sure not
willing to do any work.  I'm merely observing that there are at least
spokes of this wheel that have been invented before.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs@crankycanuck.ca