Females in the community.

[Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:39:34 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
wrote:

>
>> We recently had a suggestion her for a means of marking 
>> threads as important or useful.
>
> I really think this is entirely unnecessary.
>

Again, the benefit of such features are debatable. I'm personally 
ambivalent to anything other than the ability to edit or delete 
posts.


> 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.

I'm not talking about developer mailing lists. I'm a member of 
numerous mailing lists myself. The core developers and 
contributors can use mailing lists, NNTP, or smoke signals for 
all I care. Those who want to join such lists will and that's 
perfectly fine. What I'm talking about is building up a community 
of users.


> 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.

Yes, it's a great piece of work and I am by no means suggesting 
we replace it. It would serve as a great foundation for future 
features. I just don't think NNTP should be our primary means of 
community management.

> you'll have a hard time convincing the people who are actually 
> working on D to switch.

I knew that before I posted :) I'm not expecting any changes now. 
I'm just pointing out what I see as a potential future sore spot. 
That the web interface exists at all kind of supports my case. 
When I first came to D, most communication was done with a 
newsreader. The old Digital Mars web interface to the newsgroups 
was painful to use. The mailing list interface, IIRC, was added 
later. Your work on this forum software made it all imminently 
more useful and convenient, thanks to the features you enumerated 
above. It opened the door to more users being able to more easily 
come in and participate in discussions. I'm simply arguing that 
as the community grows, taking things to the next level will open 
the door even wider.

It's not something I feel passionately enough about to keep 
arguing for, though, so I'll drop it for now :)