Recent discussion about discussions

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 06:20:05PM +0000, Justin Whear wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Mar 2014 18:11:50 +0000, bossfong wrote:
> 
> > As a "new kid", I'm really baffled by by how much discussion in the
> > developers scene is done in mailing lists.  I strongly believe that
> > mailing-lists are not suited for heated discussions on very specific
> > issues. I even belive it's counter-productive when comparing the
> > discussion flow with modern forum software.
> > By modern forum software I mean discussion centric software like
> > disqus[1].
> > 
> > My appeal is it to switch to a more modern forum software (even
> > though I value really much, that the current webforum is implemented
> > in D).
> > 
> > Is there anything specific holding us back?
> > 
> > [1] http://disqus.com
> 
> I think most of us use email or newsreader software to participate,
> while the forum frontend caters primarily to the more casual users.
> I'm curious why you think that mailing-lists are a counterproductive
> way of handling this type of discussion, particularly when much of the
> OSS developed in the last twenty years has been managed and
> coordinated using mailing-lists.
[...]

I use the mailing list interface, because I personally can't stand any
of the new-fangled "discussion" or "forum" interfaces. The most glaring
lack in those new interfaces is a sane way to handle threading. Yes, I
know that they *do* handle threading... but only barely. There is no
way, for example, to mark an entire subthread as "ignore", or delete all
messages in a thread *except* a given subthread, collapse a subthread,
or have a sane way to navigate them without using the mouse. (I hate the
mouse. Mouse-driven UIs are horribly inefficient, and are the equivalent
of point-and-grunt in a day and age where literacy is supposed to be the
norm. Talk about poor human-computer communication.) Support for quoting
important elements from previous posts is iffy at best, totally unusable
at worst (copy-n-paste then manually insert quote tags -- what a waste
of time!).  No way to locally archive selected messages / subthreads
without unreasonable amounts of manual copy-n-pasting.  There's no way
to filter out uninteresting threads with a killfile, etc.. No sane way
to search for a regex in a subthread. No way to select some quoted code
and pipe it to a script that compiles and runs it (needs manual
copy-n-paste, blecch). No way to load some code from a local file and
indent it with an extra tab (or 4 spaces :P) so that it can be used as a
snippet in a reply (again, requires manual copy-n-paste + manual fixup
afterwards). No way to apply a diff by piping the message to `patch` in
the appropriate working directory (more copy-n-paste, which also mangles
the formatting and makes `patch` reject the diff). Need I go on?

tl;dr, I find these so-called "modern" forum interfaces nigh unusable,
and only barely tolerable. They barely scratch the surface of
functionality that I currently have at my fingertips, and yet they
require a browser with all of its bloat and memory / CPU consumption,
all just to display some text and pictures on the screen and present a
crippled UI.  Frankly, if the discussion were to take place on a web
forum, I simply wouldn't participate.  Give me back my plain text
interface, thank you very much.

(Caveat: I know I'm a minority in these views, so don't get offended. I
do feel very strongly about these things. :))


T

-- 
The peace of mind---from knowing that viruses which exploit Microsoft system vulnerabilities cannot touch Linux---is priceless. -- Frustrated system administrator.