It is better to think of mailing lists as deprecated, with these
forums as the replacements. If you happen to be able to get some use
out of the email compatibility layer, so to speak, great! But don’t
expect it.
Clearly that’s the case as it’s pretty awful to use via email.
The biggest advantage of forums is long-term discoverability. Even
if email didn’t work at all, there’s a good argument that this would
be worth the switch.
That’s simply not true. Almost all mailing lists have online archives
and are therefore perfectly discoverable.
If it doesn’t work well for you–it doesn’t for me–one can simply
disengage.
It doesn’t. This is the second mailing list that I’ve been on that has
had Discourse inflicted on it. If you look back at the history of
Discourse it’s based on the prejudices of the original authors - that
email lists are bad and their idea of what forum software should look
like is so much better. As a result the mailing list functionality in
Discourse is very poor, and is unlikely to get better.
They are perfectly welcome to have that opinion but forcing their
prejudices on everyone else is not OK. If Discourse worked well with
email, I wouldn’t care what the web UI looked like as I wouldn’t have to
use it. However that’s not the case and you are forced to use the web UI.
Obviously if you have over 100 mailing lists, the amount of time you
spend on each is pretty close to zero, so making it actually zero is
probably also fine.
I’m pretty adept at doing so having done it for decades. It isn’t
perfect but it is a single, consistent interface. Multiple websites
running multiple forum packages are not.
If it isn’t fine, then the extra effort to figure out the web
interface shouldn’t be a major barrier. It’s not like your web
browser has any trouble bookmarking 100s of sites.
And how do you suggest I manage that number of bookmarks in practice? By
visiting each one multiple times a day? That’s ridiculous.
From reading previous threads it seems pretty clear that feedback such
as mine is not going to be addressed, so as soon as this conversation is
done I’ll take your advice and unsubscribe.