Re: browser interface to forums please?

On 2017-03-27 23:23, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Mar 2017 11:31:02 +0900
> Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If you have subscribed to more mailing lists than -general, having one
>> subfolder per list can also help a lot, grouping as well some of those
>> having a low activity, for example:
>> - one folder for -hackers and -hackers-cluster.
>> - one folder for -general.
>> - one folder for -jdbc and -odbc.
>> - one for -bugs and -docs.
>> - one for -jobs and -announce, etc.
>> Something like that will make your hacking activity way easier to
>> handle. I would bet that a lot of people around here do that.
>
> I sure do. I have a heck of a lot of email in a heck of a lot of
> folders, all stored in a nice, easy to drill down hierarchy. That
> hierarchy is maintained by the Dovecot IMAP server that runs on my
> desktop computer.

I'm not against mailinglists at all, but I am for ease of use,
especially for newcomers.

Every time I tell someone about the mailinglists I then have to explain
how they can subscribe, how to create folders, filters etc. And more
often than not
they just say forget it and go to some forum.

> When it comes to having a
> lively group discussion that focuses all minds into a supermind greater
> than the sum of the parts, a mailing list is the best tool.

Well, in the end, it's not the fact that it's a mailinglist that makes
the community great,
it's just the fact that the active members share a methodof
communication that they all like to use.
Getting notifications of new messages is probably the single most
important feature to keep discussions going
and email provides that.

The thing is; mailinglists are far from userfiendly if you are not used
to them.
Even in this thread several people have explained how much work they
have done to get it
into a state where they can easily work with it. Can you expect Joe
Average to do something like that
if they want to get more involved in PgSQL?

Now, I'm not saying the mailinglists should go, I'm saying there should
be an easier way
to access them. It should be possible to register on the site, post a
message and read replies,
without having to subscribe to the list and setup a way of dealing with
the influx of messages
that are, for the most post, simply not interesting to the average user.

I'd love to have an RSS feed that contains only new questions, so I can
just watch the popup
on my screen the way I do with the rest of the world, and not have to
deal with replies to topics that I don't care about anyway.

And yes, I can probably setup my email to do something like that, the
point is that I shouldn't have to.