Only to say that:
* I used to have a very firm preference for mail, because I'm pretty
happy with Gmail as a mail interface, and I didn't want to have
another channel I had to monitor, but
* I've spent more time on Discourse over the last year, mainly on
Jupyter, but I have also set up instances for my own projects. I now
have a fairly strong preference for Discourse, because of its very
nice Markdown authoring, pleasant web interface for reviewing
discussions and reasonable mailing list mode.
+1 Markdown support, the ability to edit/delete posts, a good web interface and the possibility for new-comers to jump into an ongoing discussion are all major advantages to Discourse.
I am not concerned about spam management or moderation. NumPy-Discussion is not a very popular form, and we have plenty of mature contributors to help moderate.
* I have hardly used Github Discussions, so I can't comment on them.
Are there large projects that are happy with them? How does that
compare to Discourse, for example?
GitHub Discussions is more of a Q&A platform, like Stackoverflow. I don't think it really makes sense for free form discussion.
* It will surely cause some harm if it is not clear where discussions
happen, mainly (mailing list, Discourse, Github Discussions) so it
seems to me better to decide on one standard place, and commit to
that.
+1 let's pick a place and stick to it!
Cheers,
Matthew
On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 4:39 PM Rohit Goswami <rgoswami@quansight.com> wrote:
>
> I’m firmly against GH discussions because of the upvoting mechanism. We don’t need to be Reddit or SO. .NET had a bad experience with the discussions as well [1].
>
> [1] https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/29935
>
> — Rohit
>
> On 1 Oct 2021, at 15:04, Andras Deak wrote:
>
> On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 4:27 PM Ilhan Polat <ilhanpolat@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The reason why I mentioned GH discussions is that literally everybody who is engaged with the code, is familiar with the format, included in the codebase product and has replies in built unlike the Discourse (opinion is mine) useless flat discussion design where replies are all over the place just like the mailing list in case you are not using a tree view supporting client. Hence topic hijacking is one of the main usability difficulties of emails.
>>
>> The goal here is to have a coherent engagement with everyone not just within a small circle, such that there is indeed a discussion happening rather than a few people chiming in. It would be a nice analytics exercise to have how many active users using these lists. I'd say 20-25 max for contribs and team members which is really not much. I know some people are still using IRC and mailing lists but I wouldn't argue that these are the modern media to have proper engaging discussions. "Who said to whom" is the bread and butter of such discussions. And I do think that discourse is exactly the same thing with mailing lists with a slightly better UI while virtually everyone else in the world is doing replies.
>
>
> (There are probably a lot of users like myself who follow the mailing list discussions but rarely feel the need to speak up themselves. Not that this says much either way in the discussion, just pointing it out).
>
> I'm not intimately familiar with github discussions (I've only used it a few times), but as far as I can tell it only has answers (or "comments") and comments (or "replies") on answers, i.e. 2 levels of replies rather than a flat single level of replies. If this is indeed the case then I'm not sure it's that much better than a flat system, since when things really get hairy then 2 levels are probably also insufficient to ensure "who said to whom". The "clear replies" argument would hold stronger (in my peanut-gallery opinion) for a medium that supports full reply trees like many comment sections do on various websites.
>
> András
>
>>
>> I would be willing to help with the objections raised since I have been using GH discussions for quite a while now and there are many tools available for administration of the discussions. For example,
>>
>> https://github.blog/changelog/2021-09-14-notification-emails-for-discussions/
>>
>> is a recent feature. I don't work for GitHub obviously and have nothing to do with them but the reasons I'm willing to hear about.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 3:07 PM Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 1:57 PM Rohit Goswami <rgoswami@quansight.com> wrote:
>>> >
>>> > I guess then the approach overall would evolve to something like using the mailing list to announce discourse posts which need input. Though I would assume that the web interface essentially makes the mailing list almost like discourse, even for new users.
>>> >
>>> > The real issue IMO is still the moderation efforts and additional governance needed for maintaining discourse.
>>>
>>> Yes - that was what I meant. I do see that mailing lists are harder
>>> to moderate, in that once the email has gone out, it is difficult to
>>> revoke. So is the argument just that you *can* moderate on Discourse,
>>> therefore you need to think about it more? Do we have any reason to
>>> think that more moderation will in fact be needed? We've needed very
>>> little so far on the mailing list, as far as I can see.
>>>
>>> Chers,
>>>
>>> Matthew
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>>
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