"Tomasz Zielonka" <tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com> writes:
On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 03:12:40PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
I would tend to disagree. I think the combination of the mailing lists, a wiki and the IRC channel cover most of our communication needs.
Personally I prefer to use mailing lists, but they have one disadvantage - if you don't set up filters to split incoming mail into multiple folders, you can be flooded with messages.
I don't think that yet another variant would help us much. Web boards tend to be harder to use than email since it requires a web browser. Having too many differnt types of communication channel would reduce the readership of any one of them.
"...most of our communication needs" Yes, I can agree on that, everyone here are obviosly happy (more or less) with the mailinglists, and also I agree that a forum would not be of any use if it was only me there. :) But I think that especially outside the *nix/academic world, most people like web forums better than mailing lists. Actually, I heard the same arguments when disucssing webforum vs news at my institution, most old *nix-hackers prefered the news, and newer (non *nix-hacker) students liked web forum better. Just recently a forum was opened, but I wasn't active in the news at the time so I don't know what tipped it over. But I definatly think it will be more used than the news system once everything is moved there. My suggestion was aimed outside the haskell community of today, even if I now see that some of the other points in Simons message was more about how to get the users already here contribute more and better. For example, a very large part of the users that answered Johns survey had connections to the academic world (37% Students and 29% Working in a university) and from my experience, those intrested in programming languages are also more used to mailing lists than the rest of the group (at least at my university). But maybe the rest (such Algorithm or Human Interaction students) is not intrested in Haskell anyway, so theres no point with a forum..
How about a forum integrated with mailing lists?
An integrated forum is not a bad idea. As we all agree, it is not a good idea to split the readers in 2 and I don't think its possible to get you all to switch over at once ;) Or just a link to gmane/google/whatever where its possible to read the mailinglist in a good way from your web browser if such a thing already exists. But as it is now, at least I have trouble browsing the archive compared to forums I visit. /vb