Forums and Mailing lists

Vuntz writes that we should all join the GNOME forums, and he’s quite right.

But he also says he’s not a big fan of forums, and this raises an interesting point about barriers to involvement with GNOME.

To put it simply: Users hate mailing lists. They prefer forums. Developers hate forums. They prefer mailing lists.

I can tell you why I hate mailing lists:

Technical reasons:

1. I get too much email from lists. Most threads I don’t care about.
2. I use webmail, so I can’t use clever filters to file my mailing list mail in folders.
3. I use webmail, so I don’t get threaded discussions laid out nicely.
4. If I use digest mode, replying is a pain, and I miss out on fast-moving discussions.
5. If I don’t use digest mode, I forget to hit Reply-All.
6. Each time I want to do something to do with another part of GNOME, I have to sign up to yet another mailing list, and get yet more mail.
7. Archives are in a separate place from current material: one is on the web, the other in my inbox. When I find something in the archive, I can’t reply to it.

And social reasons:

1. Mailing lists feel silent. When you join, it’s hard to get a feel of the place.
2. Because they’re archived and googled, you’re wary of putting a foot wrong because your mistakes are preserved for ever.
3. Threads often dwindle out with no resolution, and there’s no real indication of this (and replying to ancient emails is frowned upon, apparently, whereas on forums there is the culture of the ‘thread bump’.)
4. Threads fork and are hard to keep track of.

Overall, mailing lists just seem wrong: they are a push medium, in the age of the pull medium. With a mailing list, my mailbox feels like it’s getting spammed all the time. With a forum, I go to the forum when I want to read messages. I read the ones I choose. I get notification only about the threads I’ve replied to: the one’s I am interested in. If I want to talk or read about another topic, I go to another board.

So we have a social barrier between developers and users that’s caused by technological reasons. Feasibly, it wouldn’t be too hard to fix this. There are already webforum gateways to mailing lists, but how about setting one up on the GNOME servers, as an official part of the GNOME forums?

And while we’re discussing this, would any developers care to list their reasons for disliking forums?