Dear all,
Like you, I use mailing lists for a long time (20 years for my part). The mailing lists provide a great service to open source communities, but they are not flawless and the tools used to manage them and access to their archives (Sympa, Mailman, ..) are becoming outmoded, probably like the mail itself... ):
In the meantime, a new generation of forum managers (Discourse, Flarum, ...) emerged. They have a nice and up-to-date web interface and they provide a better user experience thanks to a lot of features, like rich text formatting (Markdown), integrated search engine or ability to edit your posts to correct a mistake without having to send another mail...
For these reasons and many others, a lot of open source projects are shifting to forums. Here are some examples:
- ITK : https://discourse.itk.org/
- Gitlab : https://forum.gitlab.com/
- Rust : users : https://users.rust-lang.org/ ; developers : https://internals.rust-lang.
org/ - Atom : https://discuss.atom.io/
- Docker : https://forums.docker.com/
- TrueOS : https://discourse.trueos.org/
- Mozilla : https://discourse.mozilla.org/
- ROS : https://discourse.ros.org/
What is your opinion about forums? Would you shift to a forum manager like Discourse? Do you prefer to stay on mailing lists? Would you like to have both?
Sébastien
-- Sébastien Dinot Free Software Expert CS SI - Space BU - Payload, Data & Applications Parc de la Grande Plaine - 5, rue Brindejonc des Moulinais - BP 15872 31506 Toulouse Cedex 05 - France +33 (0)5 61 17 64 48 - sebastien.dinot@c-s.fr