Speaking as a newbie to this forum. I was not put off by signing up, as the signup was mediated through my Github login. We all have Github accounts already, so no worries about signing up, right?
-Brett
1 Like
The problem isn’t so much finding a specific email, as finding the
one that answers that email, and making sense of a thread as a
whole.
Which is no different between mailing lists and forums: the content will
be the same.
Let’s take an example:
The plural of “anecdote” is not “evidence”.
Stuff like this is why I personally can’t be bothered with old-style
mailing lists, nor interacting with the projects that rely on them.
Responses like this are why I personally will be unsubscribing tomorrow.
To answer the original question, Where To Forward issues, probably Scala Center, who are there to facilitate.
I agree that switching modes of communication was a speed bump. I missed the sense of urgency from the email list; I think that was transferred to twitter. I hope the admins can make it easy to use an email interface for those who prefer it. And why can’t I tweet a question? Or can I?
I noticed that the forum format doesn’t have a strong sense of threads ageing out. It’s not clear to me what’s ephemeral and what’s a serious discussion about the future of everything.
But I like the sense that anyone can join and say anything, possibly inane. That’s very inviting. Probably someone is sorry they invited me. On the other hand, while email and gitter is soon forgot, except by search engines, a forum post has extra stickiness.
Even Stackoverflow questions which are downvoted and left to rot will drift out into the ether, ignored until they are resuscitated by someone who exclaims, a few years later, I just hit this one today!
Also thanks for coining superscalafragilistic, or is that an old one? It captures perfectly those fragile behaviors in superaccessors. I hope they make it a tag on scala/bugs.
Well, great (although lmgtfy is unnecessarily snarky). I didn’t know about the [list] keyword technique, and I’m guessing a lot of people don’t either. I will also note that the list archive it finds is almost two months behind in indexing emails, and is also pretty much a Discourse clone.
Bye, I won’t be responding further.
Discourse gets my vote. I am glad we moved.
1 Like
I’m not. I can’t stand web UIs for mailing lists. It’s absurd that you
need to use the web UI to start a thread. Even Google Groups allows that.
It’s not a mailing list. The mailing lists were closed down. Forums were opened in their place.
The forum happens to have a mediocre email interface, but that doesn’t make it an email list. It’s forum-by-email.
If you mean, “I prefer an email list to a forum”, well, some people do, but we can’t have an informed discussion of the merits of the change when the nature of the change isn’t clearly perceived.
This has certainly been an entertaining thread (in the can’t-look-away-from-the-slow-motion-train-wreck sense), but it has drifted well away from the original concern. So, two points:
-
Discourse does support starting a new topic via email, when properly configured. The means for doing so is not described in a conveniently accessible place for the scala-users instance.
-
It appears that the original poster successfully discovered how to start a new topic, but was foiled by an anti-spam measure that requires a certain level of “trust” before allowing users to start new topics via email. I don’t know whether that trust level is configurable nor what it defaults to. The original poster was complaining that, despite being a long-time subscriber to the old mailing list, he apparently did not have the trust level required by the scale-users Discourse system to start a new topic.
The long discussion about whether it’s acceptable to force new topics to be created only through a web UI seems pretty much tangential to those points. Maybe someone who admins the system can address them.
1 Like
That’s actually big sad news that new users can’t start topics. Is this
true?
Many people initially subscribe precisely because they have a question to
ask. This makes the possibility to simply subscribe and open a thread a
great outreach tool. Disabling that would be a great loss.
Best, Oliver
I think the restriction (if any, I don’t know…) is only for starting threads via email.