I agree. A web forum would be more friendly to newcomers, easier to browse, and better organized, than the mailing list. Some people will still prefer the mailing list of course, but I think there will be enough demand to justify a forum :) - Job On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Daniel Díaz wrote:

Well, I thought that it may be a more comfortable way to communicate between us. Specially for newcomers. Don't forget that Haskell is a growing community.

It's just my opinion.

_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 15:47, Nick Bowler wrote:

On 10:37 Mon 26 Jul     , Job Vranish wrote:

...

I agree. A web forum would be more friendly to newcomers, easier to browse, and better organized, than the mailing list.

I don't understand this sentiment at all.  How are web forums easier to browse than list archives?  Especially given that there are usually multiple archives for each ML, with a variety of ways to use them (e.g., I tend to use gmane with my newsreader for this purpose).

Irrespective of what is easier to use, what really counts is where the *targets* of your post hang out. Personally I prefer a mailing list, and I would only ever use a forum if I had a better chance of getting good and informative answers there. Another option is to import the entire haskell-cafe archive into gmail :-)

...

Some people will still prefer the mailing list of course, but I think there will be enough demand to justify a forum :)

Wine has a web forum that is directly connected to their mailing lists: each post on the forum is sent to the corresponding list and vice versa. The web forum interface doesn't support proper threading, but it otherwise seems to work OK.  Perhaps something like that would be useful?

This would be a good compromise. /M -- Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org          Jabber: magnus＠therning．org http://therning.org/magnus         identi.ca|twitter: magthe

On 08:15 Mon 26 Jul , Kevin Jardine wrote:

Other topics I am interested in are served by both a web forum and a mailing list, usually with different content and participants in both. In my experience, routing one kind of content to another does not work very well because of issues of spam control, moderation, topic subdivisions, the ability to correct posts, and threading (usually web forums have these things and mailing lists do not).

Since when do mailing lists not have threading? Web forums with proper support for threading seem to be few and far apart. -- Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 7/26/10 15:54 , Kevin Jardine wrote:

On Jul 26, 6:45 pm, Nick Bowler wrote:

...

Since when do mailing lists not have threading? Web forums with proper support for threading seem to be few and far apart.

Most of the email clients I'm familiar with don't support threaded displays and most of the web forums I'm familiar with do (although the feature is not always switched on).

This is approximately the reverse of my experience. In particular, I haven't run across a non-threaded email client in something like 10 years. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkxN6l0ACgkQIn7hlCsL25UIQgCfeBNEwNo/IgsJAJ9vJjMIGRfB ypQAnR0KHLmjWh5+P8Jc+frhoAo7PXWU =tp0/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On Jul 26, 10:10 pm, Evan Laforge wrote:

Interesting, I've never figured out why some people prefer forums, but you're proof that they exist :)  

This debate is eerily similar to several others I've seen (for example, on the interactive fiction mailing list). In every case I've seen, a web forum vs. mailing list debate has been pointless at best and sometimes turned into a flame war. I think that it's best for people who prefer a web forum to establish one and use it, and for those who prefer the mailing list approach to continue to use that. Cheers, Kevin

On Jul 26, 10:37 pm, Nick Bowler wrote:

It seems to me, then, that a wine-like web forum <-> mailing list gateway would satisfy everyone without fragmenting the community?

Seehttp://forum.winehq.org/viewforum.php?f=2.

-- Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/) _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-C...@haskell.orghttp://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 04:37:45PM -0400, Nick Bowler wrote:

On 13:28 Mon 26 Jul , Kevin Jardine wrote:

...

On Jul 26, 10:10 pm, Evan Laforge wrote:

...

Interesting, I've never figured out why some people prefer forums, but you're proof that they exist :)  

This debate is eerily similar to several others I've seen (for example, on the interactive fiction mailing list).

In every case I've seen, a web forum vs. mailing list debate has been pointless at best and sometimes turned into a flame war. I think that it's best for people who prefer a web forum to establish one and use it, and for those who prefer the mailing list approach to continue to use that.

It seems to me, then, that a wine-like web forum <-> mailing list gateway would satisfy everyone without fragmenting the community?

See http://forum.winehq.org/viewforum.php?f=2.

There already is an NNTP <-> mailing list gateway via gmane that gives a nice forumy and threaded web interface for those with insufficient email readers. Adding a completely different interface seems unnecessary and fragmentary. http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈ - http://notanumber.net/

Nick Bowler writes:

On 13:58 Mon 26 Jul , John Meacham wrote:

...

There already is an NNTP <-> mailing list gateway via gmane that gives a nice forumy and threaded web interface for those with insufficient email readers. Adding a completely different interface seems unnecessary and fragmentary.

http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe

Ah, I didn't realise the gmane web interface supported followups (I knew the NNTP interface did, and mentioned this elsewhere in this thread). Looks like we've already got a web forum, then, so I guess there's nothing to do! :)

Same here. Why don't we just use this interface, which already exists? -- Benjamin L. Russell -- Benjamin L. Russell / DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/ Translator/Interpreter / Mobile: +011 81 80-3603-6725 "Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^

From my experience once a forum pops up the mailing list dies.

-- Mihai Maruseac

Darrin Chandler wrote:

IOW, if people use the proper and well known features of NNTP it would be a better world than the one we have were people do not use proper and well known features of SMTP.

SMTP is designed for delivering messages point-to-point. If your email provider incorrectly marks half the list traffic as spam, you can't read it. If your PC dies and you lose all your email, you cannot get it back again. If you hit reply, it only replies to the one person who wrote the message, not to the list. And every person has to download every single message ever sent. Because, let's face it, all a list server does is receive emails and then re-send them to everybody. If your mail system isn't operational at the moment when the email is sent, you'll never receive it and cannot ever get it afterwards. NNTP is designed to deliver list traffic. You can tell your news reader to download messages posted before you joined the group (which is impossible with a mailing list). If your PC dies, you can just re-download all the messages again. Threading actually works properly. You only need download the message bodies that you're actually interested in. And so on.

As it stands, even with SMTP you get people who post new message topics as replies to existing threads, as well as people who *somehow* "reply" to a thread but do not include In-Reply-To or References headers so threading is broken. I have no reason to think people would not do the same broken things with NNTP, foiling my plans for following some threads and ignoring others.

I constantly have trouble with this mailing list. Even gmane can't seem to thread it properly. But I've never had any trouble with threading in any NNTP group, ever. [Well, apart from that stupid Thunderbird bug they still haven't fixed yet. But that's a client bug. Use a different client and it goes away.]

* If the mailing lists go away I will probably not switch to whatever replaces it.

...aaaand this is why no matter how superior it is, this list will never get updated.

* A list <-> forum gateway is fine, as long as the message IQ doesn't drop through the floor as a result. This fear comes from personal, anecdotal evidence. YMMV.

Uh, why would that happen? I guess if it went to a web forum there'd by a greater danger of that maybe. But heck, we don't have much trouble on IRC, and that's notorious for the kind of trolls it tends to attract...

* No opinion either way on List <-> NNTP gateway.

As I say, there already is one. But because 98% of everybody uses this list as an email list, you can't go using it like it's a news group. You'll just get yelled at.

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 07:59:40PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:

NNTP is ...

It's all true. I used nntp extensively in the 90s. I never emo-quit, I just stopped using it over time due to waning ISP support and other reasons made it more of a pain. I have nothing against nntp as a protocol, but I have my reasons for no longer using it.

I constantly have trouble with this mailing list. Even gmane can't seem to thread it properly. But I've never had any trouble with threading in any NNTP group, ever.

Hmm. I don't see this mailing list as unusual in any way wrt threading, except that most people here actually *do* reply properly, most of the time.

...

* If the mailing lists go away I will probably not switch to whatever replaces it.

...aaaand this is why no matter how superior it is, this list will never get updated.

Pretty much.

...

* A list <-> forum gateway is fine, as long as the message IQ doesn't drop through the floor as a result. This fear comes from personal, anecdotal evidence. YMMV.

Uh, why would that happen?

I guess if it went to a web forum there'd by a greater danger of that maybe. But heck, we don't have much trouble on IRC, and that's notorious for the kind of trolls it tends to attract...

In my experience, either a web forum is actively maintained and moderated or it becomes a troll magnet. Trolls can live anywhere, but they prefer caves, under bridges, and web forums. People on this list who desire a forum are not the problem, and I certainly don't want to imply that. As for IRC, I think freenode/#haskell has enough quality and quantity to keep the trolls down. I haven't had much troll problems on freenode, though I'm sure others could share some tales.

...

* No opinion either way on List <-> NNTP gateway.

As I say, there already is one. But because 98% of everybody uses this list as an email list, you can't go using it like it's a news group. You'll just get yelled at.

I find it surprising that you'd get yelled at, but I don't really know. -- Darrin Chandler | Phoenix BSD User Group | MetaBUG dwchandler@stilyagin.com | http://phxbug.org/ | http://metabug.org/ http://www.stilyagin.com/ | Daemons in the Desert | Global BUG Federation

Kevin Jardine writes:

On Jul 26, 6:45 pm, Nick Bowler wrote:

...

Since when do mailing lists not have threading?  Web forums with proper support for threading seem to be few and far apart.

Most of the email clients I'm familiar with don't support threaded displays and most of the web forums I'm familiar with do (although the feature is not always switched on).

In my experience the debate between mailing list vs. web forum can become very emotional (especially when discussed via a mailing list) and I don't think it is that productive. Some people like one, some people like the other. That's why I think that it is useful to give people a choice.

One problem with creating a Web forum for a topic supported by a community that already chiefly communicates via a mailing list is that cross-referencing/cross-posting can become difficult. Suppose that somebody addresses a topic that has already been introduced on the mailing list on the forum, and that someone on mailing list then sees this topic and wants to respond. Should he/she respond on the mailing list, or the forum? How about follow-ups? What if he/she wishes to restrict follow-ups to either the forum or the mailing list? Conversely, suppose that somebody addresses a topic that has already been introduced on the forum on the mailing list, and that someone on the forum then sees this topic and wants to respond. What then? What happens if the forum users see some of the content as "appropriate" for the mailing list, but not for the forum? The only viable solution is to have every mailing list post forwarded to the forum and vice-versa, and have a moderator for the forum filter out posts containing content that is deemed inappropriate for the Web. But then this leads to an additional problem: What if some users on the mailing list deem content that has been filtered out by the moderator as appropriate for discussion on both forums, while the forum users consider it as inappropriate it? Consider the following sample discussion (which I just wrote for the purpose of this discussion, but which actually discusses a possible topic), which contains issues of technical terms containing scatological (i.e., "dirty") language, multiple levels of indentation, representation of URLs, and article length (please ignore this example if you feel upset by technical terms that contain scatological terms):

subject: A Comparison of Whitespace in Haskell and brainfuck

I discovered an article (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck) on the brainfuck programming language (not to be confused with the "Brain Fuck Scheduler" (BFS) (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Fuck_Scheduler)) that introduced a sample "Hello World!" program:

...

The following program prints "Hello World!" and a newline to the screen:

+++++ +++++ initialize counter (cell #0) to 10 [ use loop to set the next four cells to 70/100/30/10 > +++++ ++ add 7 to cell #1 > +++++ +++++ add 10 to cell #2 > +++ add 3 to cell #3 > + add 1 to cell #4 <<<< - decrement counter (cell #0) ]

...

++ . print 'H' + . print 'e' +++++ ++ . print 'l' . print 'l' +++ . print 'o' ++ . print ' ' << +++++ +++++ +++++ . print 'W' . print 'o' +++ . print 'r' ----- - . print 'l' ----- --- . print 'd' + . print '!' . print '\n'

For readability, this code has been spread across many lines and blanks and comments have been added. Brainfuck ignores all characters except the eight commands +-<>[],. so no special syntax for comments is needed. The code could just as well have been written as:

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

By comparison, a corresponding article on Haskell (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(programming_language)) provided the following Haskell alternative::

...

The following is a Hello world program written in Haskell (note that except for the last line all lines can be omitted):

module Main where

main :: IO () main = putStrLn "Hello, World!"

I became curious about the use of whitespace in the brainfuck example, and decided to see if the Haskell code could also be written more compactly. While doing some research on this topic, I discovered a Wikibook article (see http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Indentation) that discussed indentation in Haskell, and discovered that it was indeed entirely possible to write compact code in Haskell, "using semicolon[s] to separate things and curly braces to group them back." The following four rules were provided to summarize this layout process:

...

1. If you see one of the layout keywords, (let, where, of, do), insert an open curly brace (right before the stuff that follows it)[.] 2. If you see something indented to the SAME level, insert a semicolon[.] 3. If you see something indented LESS, insert a closing curly brace[.] 4. If you see something unexpected in a list, like where, insert a closing brace before instead of a semicolon.

In particular, the article discussed an interesting example of an "in within do" structure that reportedly confuses many Haskell programmers; _viz._:

...

-- why is this bad? do first thing if condition then foo else bar third thing

According to the article, the problem with this layout lies not with the if-then block, but with the fact that "the do block notices that the then part is indented to the same column as the if part...." According to the article, the problem here is that the do block causes the compiler to parse the following code such that since the line beginning with "then" is indented to the same level as the previous line, it is treated as beginning a new statement. However, in fact, "then" is a keyword used to form a conditional branch of the same "if-then" statement, so we have a contradiction. Here is the desugared version:

...

-- still bad, just explicitly so do { first thing ; if condition ; then foo ; else bar ; third thing }

According to the article, the desugared version is equivalent to something similar to "if condition;", which is considered "unfinished." Here is the revised sugared version:

...

-- whew, fixed it! do first thing if condition then foo else bar third thing

According to the article, "This little bit of indentation prevents the do block from misinterpreting your then as a brand new expression." Here is the corresponding desugared version:

...

-- the fixed version without sugar do { first thing ; if condition then foo else bar ; third thing }

Content of this nature is generally considered appropriate for discussion on a mailing list; however, some readers may consider it inappropriate for discussion on a Web forum, because of the following issues: 1. The article contains technical terms that contain scatological terms, either as a part of words within the terms, or as separate words within the terms. Such terms (especially in the latter case) may be considered offensive by some readers, particularly on a Web forum. 2. The article contains multiple levels of indentation. Most articles on Web forums contain zero or one level of indentation, and multiple levels of indentation are generally more concisely represented by right angle-brackets on a mailing list than by quotation boxes on a Web forum. What happens if the article contains three or four levels of indentation of long sentences, which is not at all uncommon on mailing lists, but relatively unusual on a Web forum? 3. The article contains multiple URLs represented as ASCII text within pairs of parentheses. These are usually hyperlinked as HTML text on a Web forum. What happens if a forum article containing many URLs represented as hyperlinked text is discussed on a mailing list which represents such URLs as ASCII text? Should the URLs be left out, or translated to an alternative representation? If the latter, then to what represenation? 4. The article contains 115 lines, which is not considered very long by mailing list standards (many mailing list article are much longer), but is considered long by most Web forum standards. What happens if this article is to be quoted on the forum, and then printed out in a frame where the article must be scrolled vertically to see its entire length? Can we be certain that readers of the forum can print out the entire article? What happens if the quoted article is then to be quoted on the mailing list, and the mailing list and forum use different representations of quotation? What happens if the readers on the Web forum neglect to include portions that readers on the mailing list consider necessary, and then the article is subject to multiple cross-quotations on the mailing list and forum? Are readers to jump back and forth between articles on the forum and the mailing list? What happens if readers of the mailing list respond using a newsreader which supports multiple levels of threading, but the forum software supports only a single level of threading, and readers from the mailing list browse the forum wishing to focus on a single sub-thread? Can these issues be safely ignored? There are also important cultural differences between a mailing list audience and a Web forum audience as well. Most mailing list readers are averse to any kind of censorship, and feel comfortable using filters to screen out spam; most Web forum readers assume expect that articles containing unnecessarily profane or scatological terms be moderated out, and resent having to deal with spam on their own. I once tried to create a Usenet group for a Lisp-like programming language where existing discussion already took place on a Web forum. The attempt ended in a disaster, with members of a related Usenet group (where I tried to invite discussion of the topic) casting flames at various aspects of the programming language and its community, and members of the Web forum refusing to post articles on the Usenet group for fear of inviting spam. Discussion on the newsgroup became extremely acerbic, with some readers using scatological terms in reference to the programming language whose potential newsgroup was under discussion, and at least one person who went to the trouble of assigning the lowest possible score to articles favoring the creation of the potential newsgroup by at least one participant on the corresponding Google group. In addition, at least one reader on the newsgroup used the "Followup-To" feature in the middle of a cross-posted thread on multiple newsgroups to direct any replies to his criticism so that they would not get posted on some of the newsgroups where the topic was being actively discussed, and at least one participant then had to send extra messages to the disincluded newsgroups and then check each following message in that thread for a "Followup-To:" header to ensure that replies were being appropriately cross-posted. In addition, I was astonished with one forum reader who mentioned that he had been surprised to receive "150 to 200 spam-scam e-mails a month" after posting three messages to a Lua Usenet group; I regularly deal with that volume of spam in approximately two business days when I have it forwarded from the spam filter of one mailing list that I administer (fortunately, none of that spam has ever reached the mailing list proper, but has been shut out by the spam filter). In short, I believe that there are certain vast and fundamental cultural differences between a mailing list (or newsgroup) readership and a potential Web forum readership. It would seem that in order for a Web forum for Haskell to function smoothly, it would need to support equivalent functionality to that of mailing list applications (or newsreaders) currently used by the Haskell community, in addition to dealing with the above issues appropriately. Ideally, the Web forum should be mirrored on some mailing list, and vice-versa, and readers should be able to reply with equal facility using either interface; this assumes that both representations be congenial to their readers--a difficult task indeed for readerships with such disparate preferences. If someone can offer an effective and appropriate solution for all the above issues, then by all means, perhaps a Web forum could help expand readership. However, the above issues should probably be considered and resolved in some manner first. In particular, steps should be taken to ensure that creation of the Web forum does not invite a cultural schism between the mailing list audience and the potential Web forum audience. -- Benjamin L. Russell -- Benjamin L. Russell / DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/ Translator/Interpreter / Mobile: +011 81 80-3603-6725 "Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 7/26/10 15:56 , Andrew Coppin wrote:

My personal preference would be for NNTP. It seems to handle threading much better. You can easily "kill" threads you're not interested in, and thereafter not bother downloading them. You can use several different client programs. And so on. However, last time I voiced this opinion, people started talking about something called "usenet", which I've never heard of...

Usenet *is* NNTP. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkxN6lQACgkQIn7hlCsL25VNdgCgt3dLl3e7l5jBEdZC5ogEamKB 5V0An0HDm12NbgWHjjNd8tuKaXggAwRM =jXbn -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 26/07/10 22:01, Andrew Coppin wrote:

Brandon S Allbery KF8NH wrote:

...

On 7/26/10 15:56 , Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

My personal preference would be for NNTP. It seems to handle threading much better. You can easily "kill" threads you're not interested in, and thereafter not bother downloading them. You can use several different client programs. And so on. However, last time I voiced this opinion, people started talking about something called "usenet", which I've never heard of...

Usenet *is* NNTP.

So I'm told. But it appears that some people believe that NNTP *is* Usenet, which is not the case. I use NNTP almost every single day, but I've never seen Usenet in my life...

So you've only ever been on private NNTP servers then, never browsed through comp.* or sci.*? Wikipedia has a nice article on usenet, of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet /M

On 27/07/10 18:58, Andrew Coppin wrote:

Magnus Therning wrote:

...

On 26/07/10 22:01, Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

So I'm told. But it appears that some people believe that NNTP *is* Usenet, which is not the case. I use NNTP almost every single day, but I've never seen Usenet in my life...

So you've only ever been on private NNTP servers then, never browsed through comp.* or sci.*?

I don't even know what they are. (Except that now, by inference, I can guess they're something to do with Usenet.)

Ah, fascinating, there must be an entire world of NNTP servers out there that I've never come across :-) My previous employer had an internal NNTP server running, which was a virtual gold mine of knowledge and insight. It was a largely unknown gold mine at that. Anyway, I know there are several locations where I can host a mailing list (google groups, yahoo etc), are there similar free services that offer free NNTP services?

For example, Microsoft has a private NNTP server for technical support.

Ah, that's very useful to know. /M

On 20:56 Mon 26 Jul , Andrew Coppin wrote:

My personal preference would be for NNTP. It seems to handle threading much better. You can easily "kill" threads you're not interested in, and thereafter not bother downloading them. You can use several different client programs. And so on. However, last time I voiced this opinion, people started talking about something called "usenet", which I've never heard of...

Conveniently, all of the haskell mailing lists have an NNTP interface available. Add news.gmane.org as a server in your newsreader and subscribe to gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. -- Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/)

Hi, I think it might be valuable to have a web forum. Not as a different interface to the same community, but as a different community. Perhaps the sort of people that prefer mailing lists and the sort of people that prefer web forums are different after all, and a community that grows up around a forum could serve different needs and exhibit different characteristics to that of the mailing list. It would not be fragmentation, it would be growth, and I imagine there would be a degree of overlap. For me the choice of mailing list or web forum depends on the topic, and how I want to use it, I think for me, when it comes to feeling part of a Haskell community a web forum may suit better than the mailing list, so I would like to try it. For me mailing lists are great for focussed technical questions and discussions, but less useful for building a community. A web forum tends to be less sterile and allows more personality to show through and I guess it allows a bit more of the culture surrounding the core tech to flourish, as members begin to form images of each other. Definitely not for many of you I am sure, but I think if the goal is to nourish a culture and encourage a true community rather than just technical Q&A, then a web forum would be an intriguing option. But a different interface to the same community doesn't make much sense. And let us try and find a Haskell based software solution for it, I thought phpBB was a joke in the OP.

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 12:09 AM, aditya siram wrote:

We have a Google group. Doesn't that qualify?

One can't post to Haskell Cafe through the usenet/NNTP/google group interface...