: I am just curious why we don't have a forum for discussion or you guys think : it's really necessary to receive lots of crap information about Solr and : nutch in email? I can offer you a forum for discussion anyway.
leaving out my personal opinions on SMTP based mailing lists vs HTTP based forums, there are some practical issues to consider... 1) it is possible to have a web based front end for reading/searching/posting to mailing lists (nabble.com demonstrates this quite well). it is much harder to have a mailing list based front end for a web based forum. so as long as there are people still using email, it makes the most sense for email to be the "core" system, and people that want a web based forum to use a web based forum UI that proxies to the mailing list. 2) There is nothing preventing people who want to start alternate online forums for discussing Solr from doing so. (I recently learned there is even a #solr IRC channel that gets moderate use by some members of hte community). 3) apache projects are required to have mailing lists. this is the "official" method of coordinating development, and where all binding votes must take place. So even if 100% of the Solr community switched to using some web based forum software, the mailing list(s) would still need to exist. 4) the comments made so far seem to indicate three classes of reasons why people are suggesting a forum instead of a mailing list... 4a) inboxes too full -- this is why email apps support filtering 4b) searching the archives -- i'm not sure what to say about this, the mailing list archives are pretty easily searchable right now on dozens of sites. 4c) browser based posting -- see nabble.com 4d) setting alerts for specific keywords -- this is the other reason why email apps support filtering. 4e) linkability of past posts -- almost every web based archive of hte mailing list supports permalinks for threads. 4f) better sub-classification of posts. This is really an orthoginal issue of if/when it makes sense to created sub-specialized community discussion channels. we could have micro-topic based email lists (ie: solr-user-multic...@lucene) just as easily as you can have micro-topic based forums -- the question is: does that improve the community. This is one of the great holy wars of online community forums, dating back to early NNTP newsgroups: when does it make sense to create sub-groups. Considering the current number of posts per/day and the subscriber counts, i personally don't think we're anywhere close to worrying about splitting up solr-user into smaller community chunks. Among other things: it makes it very hard for new community members to understand where to start, many conversations can easily evolve to encompase multiple "topics", etc...). For now, i would suggest that people only interested in certain topics take advantage of filters in their email clients to help "flag" posts they might be interested in -- but that's going to be just as error prone as if a new user tried to decide whether solr-user-multicore or solr-user-scalability is the right place to ask their question about scaling on multicore CPU machines. -Hoss
