Matthew Miller writes:
On Sun, May 05, 2019 at 12:43:02PM -0700, stan via devel wrote:
To each their own, of course, but there was a long discussion of discourse here a while ago. I tried it out, but it was like a bad version of a mailing list. It sent me a mail informing me that there were messages to read. Then I had to go there and read the messages on the web, using their interface.
That's definitely the primary intended mode of interaction,
To be fair, that's *one* intended mode of interaction, when Discourse is used as an adjunct to a blog platform. As a substitute for "devel" or "users", I would expect that it would sit there in a window (or windows) of your browser pretty much always visible, or on the next desktop, and there'd be a "bomb crater" emoji instead of the switch for turning notifications on.
I could see using it in a "users" style forum, where I'd use it like Twitter: wander in, see if there was anything interesting, if there were a post or two with insufficient answers I'd provide what help I could, and then come back next week and do the same. I wouldn't want to use it in a "devel" forum, but that's likely *mostly* because I have a complex set of customizations for dealing with my devel forums in my mail client, and I'm pretty sure they won't be replicated in any web forum. I would probably eventually come up with alternatives and workarounds, but for many months I would be in A Very Bad Bad Mood, and Extremely Unpleasant to Be Around. :-)
This should not be considered advocacy one way or the other vis-a-vis Fedora channels -- I'm here more or less by accident, but if GNU Mailman can provide better support to the Fedora community I'd like to push that forward.
but there is also a "mailing list mode" which does more of what you want. (One email per post, and you can reply directly.)
Which ain't so great. Not for the person who likes mailing lists, and not for the people who like discourse as a platform. It's partly social, of course, but there's also the technological difference between synchronous and asynchronous messaging. Platforms designed for synchronous messaging tend to have longer "conversations", whereas ansynchronous messaging tends to result in branchy thread trees.
Much as I love mailing lists, I admit that there are valid arguments and personal preferences for web fora. This is going to be one of those situations where it kinda has to be tyranny of some kind, maybe the tyranny of inertia, maybe tyranny of the majority. But some people (fvo "some" including "many") will be dissatisfied.
Steve