Does OpenSCAD deserve a modern Forum platform?
On Fri Jan 22 15:30:08 PST 2021 acraigwest@gmail.com said:
I know I would be gone if the mailing list wasn't good enough. Forums
require you to choose to go to the forum, choose a top to read, etc. A
miasling list, you just read messages as they come in. I have way too many
things I am following to put that much attention into any one thing
Exactly! There are some products that only use Forums. I ONLY use the Forum to ask a specific question, and check occaisionally for answers. I do NOT bother to browse the Forum daily to see whats going on. That wastes FAR too much time.
Email lists I can skim through very quickly, and reply to the occaisional post quickly.
--
Try my Sensible Email package! https://sourceforge.net/projects/sensibleemail/
I agree: without the email option, I would be gone.
Jon
On 1/22/2021 6:36 PM, Rick wrote:
I follow mail lists because precisely because it is low effort.
Move this to a forum and I won't follow it.
On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 6:31 PM A. Craig West <acraigwest@gmail.com
mailto:acraigwest@gmail.com> wrote:
I know I would be gone if the mailing list wasn't good enough.
Forums require you to choose to go to the forum, choose a top to
read, etc. A miasling list, you just read messages as they come
in. I have way too many things I am following to put that much
attention into any one thing
I've been enjoying the email format since my sign-up day. I don't want to throw gasoline on the fire, especially since this next bit borders on obscure.
If one explores the world of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), one discovers that it begins at the forum level, but creates the near-equivalent of a mailing list. I have a few hundred subscriptions to RSS feeds and when I open that program, anything new appears for my evaluation. Mark as read (even if I don't) or read it. Open in a browser for replies (or not).
Nearly every platform has a handful of RSS feed readers, some of which are integrated into browsers or are stand-alone applications for desktop/laptop and mobile devices.
/returning to lurk mode/
On Friday, January 22, 2021, 7:00:33 PM EST, jon <jon@jonbondy.com> wrote:
I agree: without the email option, I would be gone.
Jon
On 1/22/2021 6:36 PM, Rick wrote:
I follow mail lists because precisely because it is low effort. Move this to a forum and I won't follow it.
On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 6:31 PM A. Craig West acraigwest@gmail.com wrote:
I know I would be gone if the mailing list wasn't good enough. Forums require you to choose to go to the forum, choose a top to read, etc. A miasling list, you just read messages as they come in. I have way too many things I am following to put that much attention into any one thing
OpenSCAD mailing list
Discuss@lists.openscad.org
http://lists.openscad.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.openscad.org
Rather than just saying "me too" and creating noise without really
creating data, I threw together a quick SurveyMonkey survey.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/9MKZ2XY
It asks a few multiple choice questions and has an "other thoughts"
box. My guess is that it will take less than a minute to fill out.
It will still be a self-selected survey, and of course we can't survey
people who don't follow the mailing list or the forum, but it still
might provide some measurable statistics rather than just how many
people say "me too".
If I've done things right, the current results should be visible at
https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-LK6WQBX57/ .
More information about Discourse.
It is possible to use Discourse to create a read-only mirror of a mailing list.
<rubytalk.org> is a Discourse mirror of the ruby-talk mailing list.
Compared to <forum.openscad.org>, <rubytalk.org> is:
- Readonly. You must join the mailing list and use email to post.
- Registration is simpler (you only subscribe to the mailing list, you don't also have to register with the forum.)
- Nicer looking interface, continuous scrolling, more advanced search features.
How the mailing list maps to Discourse:
- The Discourse category "ruby-talk" is the mailing list.
- Topics within the category correspond to email subject lines.
- Posts within a topic correspond to mailing list posts.
It is possible to set up a readonly discourse mirror of the openscad mailing list without disturbing the existing infrastructure. That would be the first step in a migration away from Nabble.
It still seems impossible to set up a two-way link between a mailing list and a Discourse category. I found a discussion on Wikimedia Space where they discuss their goal of being able to emulate a mailing list using Discourse. Their plan would involve migrating all the old mailing list posts into Discourse and shutting down the mailing list. Quotes:
Imagine a World where all public mailing archives would be searchable in Wikimedia space, and where anyone could follow and participate in each list-category via email or web, according to their preferences. Imagine how off-topic threads could be moved to an on-topic list-category. How posts could be tagged, bookmarked, liked… through the web interface.
Email-based users shouldn’t miss any feature compared to our existing mailing lists. This is a hypothesis that needs testing, though.
I see they ran some experiments late 2018/early 2019 to try and configure Discourse to work this way, but then the initiative stalled and later the project was shut down.
On the IRC chat, user ali1234 notes that the OpenSCAD forum on
Thingiverse has over 6000 members and the subreddit has 1500.
The Thingiverse group has about 30 posts in 2021. (That's across three
topics.)
It's harder to measure the reddit traffic (because it doesn't say at the
top level when the most recent comment on a thread was), but it looks
like there's in the neighborhood of 100 there.
My mailbox says that this mailing list has had 305 messages.
I have no idea how many members the mailing list and its associated
forum have (Michael?), but it seems clear that it's far more active than
either of the others.
On 1/23/21 12:45 PM, Jordan Brown wrote:
I have no idea how many members the mailing list and its associated
forum have (Michael?), but it seems clear that it's far more active
than either of the others.
And it is also worth noting that this mailing list tends to involve a
more technical level than many who might be members at Thingiverse, etc.
will want/need.
I freely admit, I keep all my email for this topic in its own folder and
plan eventually to review each post/topic for the methods I am not (yet)
ready to try. I spend almost all my time lurking, while also usually
struggling to follow ALL the logic of the back and forth questions and
proposed answers.
I am very happy doing things the way I am, lurking, reading the "pushed"
posts (so I don't have to seek them out at the forum), trying out some
of the proposed code and occasionally adding my basic-user point of view
into the discussion.
I appreciate the expertise of those who DO routinely contribute
here...along with the typically helpful replies to those, like me, who
are less expert.
I would prefer a forum. Many forums have mail notifications as an option, of
you want that.
Face it, mailing lists, while they do work, they aren't really modern, and,
most importantly, they don't feel modern. I can promise you that if I asked
my kids (26 and 24) what a mailing list is, they wouldn't know. When a new
potential user pops in to see what OpenSCAD is, if he/she doesn't understand
what a mailing list is, chances are that we've lost him/her before even
trying the program.
Also, realistically, who many active users do we have on the mailing list?
20? 50? We may very well be looking at survivor bias, ie a skewed result
because we are only asking the people who bothered to stay. Kind of like how
they in WW2 checked where the bullet holes were in aircraft after missions
to see which parts to harden with more armor, which, oddly enough were
non-vital parts, because they were checking the aircraft that got home, not
the ones that didn't make it home.
--
Sent from: http://forum.openscad.org/
And it is also worth noting that this mailing list tends to involve a
more technical level than many who might be members at Thingiverse, etc.
will want/need.
I suspect that the higher technical level of the mailing list is correlated with the list having a higher proportion of experienced old-timers who may be more comfortable with email.
Get rid of the mailing list and a swath of those old timers may disappear.
This discussion thread, and the "modern forum" discussion thread from December, both began with a request to switch to Discourse. Some OpenSCAD users want a forum that "looks and feels modern", and while I don't know what that means, it seems that Discourse satisfies the requirement. So let's consider Discourse.
Somebody could create a Discourse forum with a read-write "General" category, plus a read-only "Mailing-List" category that is synced with the mailing list. This would satisfy the needs of two groups of people: those who won't use a mailing list, and those who won't use a forum. Mirroring the mailing list in Discourse provides a nicer web UI for browsing the archives than what we currently have.
Although this is a compromise, I feel it is better than getting rid of the mailing list, which is what some people are suggesting.
On Sat, Jan 23, 2021, at 2:20 PM, Troberg wrote:
I would prefer a forum. Many forums have mail notifications as an option, of
you want that.
I personally don't want that. The email notification feature is quite unpleasant on the forums that I've tried. Quite different from the user experience of a mailing list, which is what I want.