On 2020-06-24 11:17:03, Kushal Das wrote:
On 24/06/20, George Kadianakis wrote:
The [tor-relays] mailing list might have been a cool support forum 15 years ago but I think nowdays people would prefer a more modern interface to getting support and love. Staying frozen in old-sk00l mediums like IRC and mailing lists severely limits the parts of our community who is not used to such ancient technology (and that part will only keep growing as time move forwards as it usually does).
Discourse will be a great add as the support platform, but we should make sure to keep the mailing lists alive for the real disucssion. As many of the Python folks already found the similar issue in the discuss.python.org. While it has a much newer interface, but may not be that great of an interface while tracking any large discussion.
Just to be real clear here: I did not think of replacing mailing lists at all when I mentioned discourse. I only thought of forums already established on the web, namely the blog, GitLab, and RT, to a lesser extent. At least "support stuff", for which I don't immediately think of mailing lists.
But you (George) are right: Discourse could attempt to replace mailing lists, or at least some. I would be very careful about this, however. As Kushal mentioned, some groups have tried this and have only been moderately successful. In Debian, in particular, there was a significant backlash from mailing lists users frustrated by the sub-optimal email workflow provided by Discourse. It's not just a maillig list drop-in replacement...
That said.
Also, is there any plan to move to Mailman3 for our mailing lists? It has a much nicer web interface and other useful updates.
Not that I am aware of, but we *will* have to make that jump eventually, probably when Debian releases "bullseye", the next stable release. Mailman 2 runs on Python 2 and is technically already EOL, although I suspect that Debian, along with basically all other Linux distributions, will be stuck maintaining Python 2 and Mailman 2 for security updates for one last cycle.
But after that, yes, we'd have to migrate to Mailman 3. And yes, the interface is much, much better. I would also argue the (technical and graphic) design is simpler and better, although there are some functionality (like "invite") still missing. It's not a trivial upgrade but a migration, if I remember correctly:
https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/migration.html
But yes, that will need to happen eventually. I wouldn't hold my breath, however, and wait until we get Mailman 3 to address the moderation problems. Fundamentally, it is still the same moderation system as a mailing list in that (for example) there's one or few moderator per list, and Discourse is a radical (and interesting, IMHO) shift from that, in many other ways.
A.