On Sun, May 27, 2018 at 6:13 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> I'm curious what would be different here from what our archives provide.
> We could certainly have a single "all lists" archive page but that seems
> more likely to be just completely confusing than actually useful at all.
Any replacement to our own archives will need to provide access to
mail from over 20 years ago to be in any way usable. It's not uncommon
to have to go back that far.
Personally, I don't buy the idea that the need to use a mailing list
rather than a web forum is a notable obstacle for new contributors.
PGLister seems pretty slick to me. It has eliminated all of the
frustrations that I had. Maybe we need to do a better job when it
comes to communicating what the benefits of a mailing list are,
though.
There are real, practical reasons to prefer a mailing list; that
preference isn't just due to ingrained habit. I'm pleased that there
has been a drive to modernize some of the community's infrastructure
in recent years, but only because those changes turned out to be
unalloyed improvements (at least in my view). Besides, while mailing
lists may seem antiquated to a lot of people, aren't web forums almost
as antiquated? Sites like Stack Overflow are very clearly not designed
to work as discussion forums. They do not allow subjective questions,
and it's common for moderators to swiftly delete new threads. Stack
Overflow is popular because it provides the fastest possible access to
a crowdsourced answer, without requiring or even encouraging
participation.
--
Peter Geoghegan