Engine of forum

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, August 21, 2018 8:40:32 AM MDT Steven Schveighoffer via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On the contrary, many of the regular contributors here, don't give a
> lick about the forum software, as long as it's primarily backed by the
> newsgroup server. Many, including myself use the NG server, many others
> use the mailing list interface. If the NG was ditched, I would have a
> big problem communicating, as I hate dealing with web forums.

I use the mailing list interface and have since well before the current
forum interface was added. I have years worth of history available offline,
and I can easily keep track of what I have and haven't read, even if I
access it from separate machines (which is actually why I use the mailing
list rather than the newsgroup - the newsgroup software that I used
previously had no way to sync which messages were read between machines). I
do use web forums for other communities, but I _much_ prefer being able to
use my e-mail client to using a web interface. And plenty of other
programming communities use mailing lists rather than web forums. The only
real downside I see to mailing lists is that they're more of a pain if you
just want to look at the content occasionally rather than actually being
involved. So, they definitely favor people who follow them actively over
folks who are very casual about it. But our system has the advantage of
giving folks three different interfaces to the same content. So, you can
choose whichever you prefer. The only major downside I see to the current
setup is folks who don't understand that the "forum" is just one of several
interfaces to a newsgroup, and they come in here and complain that the forum
software doesn't have some feature or other that they want. Maybe some of
those features would be nice, but they generally do not go well with either
a newsgroup or mailing list (which a large percentage of the major
contributors use), and in my experience, the features you get from a
newsgroup or mailing list are more than adequate for the kind of
communication that goes on here.

I would be _very_ unhappy if we ever switched to something else like
discourse or if the forum software got features that resulted in folks there
posting a bunch of markup or the like instead of plain text, since that
would be bad for the mailing list and newsgroup users. Fortunately, since
Walter is a newsgroup user and definitely seems to like the current setup,
it's unlikely that it's going to be screwed up any time soon.

- Jonathan M Davis