On Fri, 2020-09-25 at 14:33 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> and make contributing to GNOME more attractive to newcomers.
Hi,
do you think the newcomers do not know how the mail works? Or it's used
as an excuse to replace something working for years with something new,
with new bugs, its maintenance requests and such? Just wondering.
You're making a simple and understandable mistake, here: email is one thing, mailing lists are another. The two should not be conflated.
To be more specific, mailing lists have terrible signal-to-noise ratio, and terrible moderation tools. Both issues have a definite impact on newcomers, as well as veterans of a project; the amount of people actively engaging on mailing lists in the GNOME project has been trending down over the past decade or so, compared to the early 2000s—and we were complaining about decreased SNR even back then. For a newcomer, mailing lists are hard to search in, and hard to contribute to; for long time contributors, mailing lists are mostly noise.
Discourse is an attempt at solving the issue; it's much more effective at managing signal-to-noise ratio, because on Discourse you can explicitly tag topics; split them and merge them at any point in time; re-tag and re-categorise topics; and all the history is preserved, instead of leaving trails of threads around different lists that are, effectively impossible to follow. Additionally, its moderation tools are based on a bottom-up approach, instead of having a selected list of people that have to edit the content. The longer you use Discourse (from its web UI), the more you are "trusted"; and the more you are trusted, the more access you have, and the more you're entrusted with moderating and curating the community. Topics, posts, and users can be easily flagged for moderation, and anti-spam measures are much more effective.
There's also an infrastructure side of things, which cannot be discounted: large mailing lists are virtually indistinguishable from spam, in the eyes of the people who own mail servers; currently, we're operating a large set of mailing lists by asking to be whitelisted in the various anti-spam systems, but we're always one bug or one bad day away from the whole house of cards crashing down. This is not the '90s any more. Discourse is a web application that runs inside its own container; it's mostly easy to deploy, and since it's maintained, it gets updated fairly often; from a sysadmin perspective, it's well-integrated in our infrastructure.
Ciao,
Emmanuele.
