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Re: [Orekit Developers] [Survey] Mailing list or forum, what is your preferred communication tool?




Sébastien Dinot <sebastien.dinot@c-s.fr> a écrit :

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 <https://www.sympa.org/>, Mailman
<http://list.org/>, ..) are becoming outmoded, probably like the mail
itself... ):

In the meantime, a new generation of forum managers (Discourse
<https://www.discourse.org/>, Flarum <https://flarum.org/>, ...)
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?

+1 to discourse.

We have to agree our mailing lists are in a sorry state. Searching
in the archive is depressing with a web interface with zero
functionalities (an ugly page where you can only click on each
month number to see the messages from said month).

As our community is growing, we have to scale up to something that
can scale up.

Luc


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