On Sun, Jul 28, 2024 at 08:53:18PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote: > Hi, > > On Sun, Jul 28, 2024 at 06:15:21PM +0100, Ian Molton wrote: > > Which web forum has the commuity moved to then? I should like to join it... > > Sadly, the Debian project is not willing to move with the times and > bless a modern web support community such as Discourse (a Stack > Overflow or AskUbuntu-like interface, for those who are unaware). > ...
Here's my thoughts on this. Stackoverflow has a nice presentation as do many of these web forums. It's pretty easy to use and one can format the posts nicely and all. I get it. The modern world has moved on from email lists like this. On the other hand, I never read web forums, I only really search for things in a search engine and then end up on a forum with possible answers. I have no clue how people actually read them and keep up were there are so many hundreds or thousands of forums to keep up with and so many posts per hour. At least with a mailing list, I can get it in my inbox and look at the subject lines and summarily delete the threads I'm not or no longer interested in. It forces me to deal with it. Hence I'm on a very limited number of lists like this. Maybe one of you younger folks can teach me how one deals with keeping up with a forum like that. It seems like it means leaving a bunch of tabs open in a browser all the time, perhaps on a laptop, desktop and phone and constantly checking out if there's new messages. It seems insane. I'd just end up letting things build up and not check daily. This model does not work for me. And getting all forum posts in email becomes overwhelming. It's not like this list, it's often like 10x more when people post micro-follups like a back and forth chat. At one time I thought RSS feeds might be the answer but this seem to be dead, or maybe they're not dead but nothing mainstream uses them anymore. I really don't have a great solution. Anyway, if this list moved to a forum, what you could do is cross post links to the forum for say a year to nudge people to use it. That might finally push things over. If this moves to a forum, it would suck if nobody answers questions there or the responses are low quality. I'm totally grateful for all the responses I've gotten from folks on this list over the years and it would suck for me big to post stuff in a forum and get a load of crap responses just because people are trying to push up their score, or get no responses at all. So whatever the future is, I hope someone thinks some of these things. I'm all for something better if it is all around better and that means the content within it, not just the fancy formatting. Michael Grant
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