Hi everyone!
I received 2 off-list emails. Please do not send me off-list emails. I am exhausted 😩 and cannot do private support in addition to public support, code development, news writing, website making and everything else in GIMP. 😛
This is even more true as I don't really see anything private/sensitive in the 2 emails I received. Really no need to make them private, except for making me work double (whereas as public emails, someone else could have answered). I generally advise contributors to preserve themselves from overworking by not answering to private messages.
Anyway, regarding unhappiness about the new platform, I will mainly answer that there is not much we can do. We are heavily relying on GNOME Infrastructure (which we thank for this) and they have their own reasons (one of them is that mailing lists are apparently one of the elements in their stack which prevent them from dropping Python 2; we can relate!). Cf. the link in my original email.
Now we could always try to fight against the current and persuade GNOME infrastructure team, but we made a small opinion tour among the current core team and nobody really had particular love or use of our mailing lists. Also we realize it's very low volume these days (barely a few threads per month, counting all mailing lists together). Myself I barely look at mailing lists every once in a while and make a random answer sometimes. And there were several mailing lists I was not even subscribed to (I did for the sake of this announcement). So that's probably why none from the core team is really trying to fight this change.
There is one more thing to take into consideration: more infrastructure means more work. I said it above, I am exhausted by this all. I was only managing one of the mailing lists so far (the gimp-gui one, the most recent) and still had to regularly handle spams. I am personally thankful that this work goes to GNOME admins now. Moreover I would not try to find alternative mailing list providers either. Now, same as hundreds of third-party forums discuss GIMP out there, people are welcome to create third-party mailing lists to discuss GIMP if that's really what you are into. I won't be such a person; and apparently it looks like nobody else from the core team is so far.
One last thing: I am aware that Discourse is not perfect. I also spent some time today to try and understand how to efficiently transform it into a mailing list equivalent.
For questions about only receiving emails for the "gimp" tag, I think that you should not try to use the "Enable mailing list mode" option. Instead just go to the "gimp" tag page (
https://discourse.gnome.org/tag/gimp), click the bell icon on the top-right and set to "Watching" mode. This way, you will be notified of absolutely all messages for this tag. Then in your "Emails" preferences, set "Email me when I am quoted, replied to, my @username is mentioned, or
when there is new activity in my watched categories, tags or topics" to "always". This should transform every notification into emails, in other words you will receive an email for every message added in the "gimp" tag. You can even directly reply to a notification email from your mail client without going to Discourse.
At least, so far it worked for me (I tried today, and I only received emails for the 2 messages which came in with the "gimp" tag, no other emails). So it's probably the right setting.
Anyway please understand that it's really not about comparing the Discourse and mailing list technologies. GIMP is not a discussion platform, we only provide these channels on the side because it's a cool community tool, but we cannot spend all our time managing these. This is why we need to go with the flow of what GNOME is proposing (as long as it's not completely wrong; e.g. if they had proposed to go for some walled garden proprietary network for the main discussion channels, I would have questioned the choice). I am not into gamification, infinite scrolls or such things either. Us accepting this platform is not about us wanting these. It's really about having a limited core team and nobody highly interested into maintaining complicated infrastructure for a different system than what GNOME does. That's about it.
Also for the 2 people who sent private emails, forgive me for not answering directly and privately to you. It's not against you, I just hope you will understand I am trying to preserve my mental sanity here. Someone was even apparently "shocked" that I used a gmail account. The reason is actually exactly the same (avoiding private emails): historically I wanted to avoid spreading my main email address too much (even though I now realize it was a vain wish, I was young back then! 😜) so I created this account as a trash email, maybe 15 years ago, and that's the address I historically used to subscribe to mailing lists. I am still receiving uncountable numbers of emails daily.
And now you'll understand why I am doing a single and hopefully last answer on this topic. I'm just tired and don't want to paste the same email twice (or more).
Actually sending private emails, you kind of made a counter-argument against mailing lists where it is indeed quite common that people feel they can just continue discussions in private. But there is a reason why it's public: anyone can join in, help and contribute to the discussion. No need to involve a single person only (forbidding others to help by going private). In GIMP, we work in full transparency, with public infrastructure. We don't want private discussions, and unfortunately as you showed, this is often what some people believe they can afford to do with emails. So you both shot your opinion in the foot by telling me that mailing lists are better while deciding not to use these to tell me this. 🤣
So yes, bottom line: mailing lists will be gone. It's not a private decision from anyone in GIMP team (I got notified today myself of the end-of-month deadline), though clearly nobody fought against it either. It's not really something we can or want to control so there is really no need to give counter-arguments here. If you really wish to do so, you are welcome to ask the GNOME Infrastructure team. If they back down from their decision, we'll happily comply and keep the mailing lists.
Jehan
GIMP team
