Females in the community.

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 08:41:18 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> Yeah, I get that. But then we're maintaining two separate 
> databases. The database for the web interface should be the 
> primary, with all of the post meta-data stored together with 
> the posts themselves in one place. Then, people who pull the 
> posts in a newsreader after any edits have been made will at 
> least see the edited posts (still nothing to do for the mailing 
> list subscribers, I suppose).

NNTP users won't see the successive edits, though, and those who 
have their newsreader poll the server won't see them at all.

> It also allows much easier moderation, not relying on the news 
> server admin to delete spam and any posts that go beyond the 
> bounds of propriety.

I don't think we have an issue with moderation.

The spam filter could be a bit better, I suppose. Then again, we 
get MUCH less spam than any off-the-shelf forum software, since 
the spambot authors target them specifically, thus their spambots 
will find their way in much easier.

> More than once I've seen people post here looking for a way to 
> edit or delete their posts.

Perhaps forum.dlang.org could make it clearer that once a post is 
sent, it is immutable.

> We recently had a suggestion her for a means of marking threads 
> as important or useful.

I really think this is entirely unnecessary.

"Sticky" threads on typical web forums are used to post things 
such as FAQs or things people should read before posting. 
Essentially, in pretty much all cases, this feature is used as a 
poor way to change the website in general in order to bring some 
things to users' attention.

If the latter feature becomes required, since we have full 
control over the forum website's contents as a whole, we can look 
at how we can implement that feature properly (e.g. by adding a 
notice at the top of the thread list, or to the "create new 
thread" form, etc.)

Still, I think this feature is only really necessary for websites 
where "the forum is the website". We could just as well post 
important information to dlang.org.

If you have a specific need, we can discuss that.

> These are the sorts of thing that people *expect* today, 
> whether everyone finds them beneficial or not. It's just one 
> more thing about the D community that doesn't jibe with 
> expectations, like the way the web site looked before the 
> revamp. It's not a major issue in and of itself, just an 
> annoyance and a lack of convenience, but taken together as a 
> part of the whole it's one more point of complaint. One that 
> could be easily resolved.

I really don't think that "mailing list phobia" is something we 
need to pay much attention to. Any way you turn it, it comes down 
to personal preference, and once you have configured your email 
client to deal with mailing lists in a nice way, there is not 
much left to object to. Ultimately, all serious open-source 
software projects do their development on mailing lists. The 
Linux kernel, Git, Gnome, KDE, LibreOffice, you name it. Can you 
imagine someone telling Linus Torvalds with a straight face that 
mailing lists are antiquated and it's time for him and his gang 
to get on with the times? The truth is that familiarity with 
mailing lists is simply necessary for any serious software 
developer.

Don't forget that forum.dlang.org has features that no other 
forum software can offer, features many people depend on. That 
includes its NNTP/email interoperability - one third of users 
communicating on this group don't do it via the forum. (If you 
think that one third is not too bad, don't forget that that 
includes most of the core team.) The ratio will probably be lower 
on "learn", but higher on the more technical groups.

The forum offers multiple view modes. Many people don't use the 
default one, which mimics typical web forums. One view mode I've 
added at Andrei's request, I think he will be unhappy to see it 
go.

The D forum also seems to be frequently lauded outside D's 
community for its performance, and people seem to often present 
in as an example of D's capabilities. It seems that any time 
someone posts a link to forum.dlang.org, someone mentions its 
unusually low response times.

I am continuously collecting (constructive) feedback about the 
forum. Last year I made an overhaul and implemented nearly all 
feature requests. If you have specific requests for improvement, 
please create a GitHub issue:

https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/issues

All in all, I'm rather certain that as soon as an actual serious 
proposal to replace forum.dlang.org with e.g. Discourse appears, 
it will face just as much, if not more, vocal disagreement. You 
can always create a poll or something if you wish - out of 
curiosity, since as mentioned above, you'll have a hard time 
convincing the people who are actually working on D to switch.