[tor-talk] Until there's a REAL effing way to communicate, that evey1 can use, I'm DONE

[Kostas Jakeliunas]

Totally out of the blue, but if there were a forum which also had a simple
way of subscribing to threads and sub-forums so that one could receive
emails and *respond* by replying to the special email address used for
relaying them the message, would that be something worth considering?
(Perhaps it's too late and so on, simply wondering.)

"tor-talk" could then be, for example, a sub-forum, while would also
effectively act as a mailing list which could be subscribed to. Current
subscribers could be transparently transferred to the new system, which
would act all the same: the semantics of posting to the mailing list and
receiving messages would be the same. Hence the solution would be scalable
in the sense that if other projects were to switch to such a system, one
would only need to subscribe to appropriate developer etc. mailing lists /
sub-forums to be able to follow and participate in the main development
etc. threads.

Such a system would allow for many nice options, including easy forking,
hopefully: for example, I suppose some folks on tor-talk etc. may dread the
idea of an influx of lame comments, piggybacking on threads featuring
specific discussions ("how do i download tor" in the middle of some
concrete discussion thread and so on). The additional 'forum thread'
functionality could be leveraged so that one could mark posts as 'OT' /
derailing (as in, just a click in the forum (each email/reply could include
a permalink to the forum) by a mod / approved member). The post(s) would
then be automatically moved to a separate thread, and an appropriate
message would be automatically posted with links to the thread etc. People
following the old thread in question could easily (un)subscribe to/from the
new OT thread (reply to the automatically posted email informing of thread
fork if in mailing list, or click a button if in forum view), so that those
interested in the OT topic(s) could continue following the new thread, but
others only interested in the to-the-point thread (on e.g. tor-talk) would
not have to waste time reading a myriad of confused / OT messages.

AFAIK, there's no such solution at present, at least for something which
would effectively implement a mailing list allowing for active
participation and even moderation from the email side of things. But it
sounds doable, and might turn out to be a great benefit to the broader
world of open source and so on. A project idea? :)

Kostas.