NNTP/SMTP holding the forum back

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:39:34 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 08:41:18 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>> 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.

I don't think he's talking about sticky placement, as much as 
some kind of tagging of threads.  Of course, that raises issues 
of how you surface those tagged threads and whether people will 
bother applying the tags.

> 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?

Not only can I imagine it, I would say it to his face.  Mailing 
lists were incredibly outdated back when I first encountered them 
decades ago, let alone today, which is why I have never used them.

> The truth is that familiarity with mailing lists is simply 
> necessary for any serious software developer.

Not really, in fact, you can easily tell which dev teams are 
ancient by the fact that they still use a mailing list as the 
main form of communication.

Now, there are certainly benefits to SMTP/NNTP that centralized 
forums don't have, no question, and a lot of web forum software 
is ridiculously broken and even worse than a mailing list.  But 
you could do a lot better than a mailing list, it's just rarely 
done.  I though Apache Wave had some interesting ideas on 
collaboration, though I never tried it, so I can't say if they 
pulled it off.

> 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.
---snip-and-paste---
> 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.

As I understood what Mike originally wrote and he's now made 
certain below, nobody is critizing DFeed for its features or 
suggesting replacing it, only removing the lowest-common 
denominator accomodation of email and newgroup readers.

> 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, I've seen that praise too, DFeed is a good showcase for D.  
The "Save and preview" button was a great addition; I use it 
often, particularly for long posts, and it largely obviates his 
desire to edit a post whenever.

I'd like some sort of formatting language, like github has.  
Can't you provide that option in the forum and send the resulting 
HTML as text/html MIME attachments to SMTP and NNTP?  I don't 
know if NNTP supports MIME.  Of course, some may complain about 
HTML messages, but perhaps they can be handed some text 
formatting fallback?  Anyway, not a huge issue, but nice to have.

The current messaging status quo, where everyone gets an 
undifferentiated stream of messages and then are forced to 
manually scan the headings or run a keyword search on all the 
contents, is incredibly outdated.  However, advancing beyond that 
will require some work, either to manually tag and vote on 
posts/threads or write software that will at least automate 
tagging, which is why it is rarely done.

But we need to move beyond this decades-old tech someday, as it's 
wasting too much of our time.