[Python-ideas] Moving to another forum system where

[James Lu]

One of the reasons Guido left was the insane volume of emails he had to read on Python-ideas. 

> A tiny bit of discussion is still better than none at all.
> And even if there's no discussion, there's a name attached
> to the message, which makes it more personal and meaningful
> than a "+1" counter getting incremented somewhere.
> 
> Counting only makes sense if the counts are going to be
> treated as votes, and we don't do that.

I agree. I think this is good evidence in favor of using GitHub pull requests or GitHub issues- you can see exactly who +1’d a topic.

GitHub also has moderation tools and the ability to delete comments that are irrelevant, and edit comments that are disrespectful. 

> I hope that, if any such change is made, a forum system is
> chosen that allows full participation via either email or news.
> Otherwise it will probably mean the end of my participation,
> because I don't have time to chase down and wrestle with
> multiple web forums every day.

+1, everyone should be accommodated. I believe GitHub has direct email capability. If you watch the repository and have email notifications on, you can reply directly to an email and it will be sent as a reply.

—
To solve the problem of tons of email for controversial decisions like :=, I don’t think GitHub issues would actually be the solution. The best solution would to have admins receive all the email, and broadcast a subset of the email sent, only broadcasting new arguments and new opinions. 

Admins can do this “summary duty” every 12 hours on a rotating basis, where each admin takes turns doing summary duty. 

This solution would mean a slower iteration time for the conversation, but it would significantly lessen the deluge of email, and I think that would make it more bearable for people participating in the conversation. After all, once a proposal has been fleshed out, what kind of conversation needs more than say 30 rounds of constructive discussion- in that case, if people reply every 25 hours, the discussion would be done in a month.

For transparency purposes, all of the email can be made received for approval can be published online.