[chef] Re: Re: Re: What if we killed the mailing list altogether...

[Eric Herot < >]

Judging by how rarely code snippets and formatting are used on the mailing list I would argue that they are actually not a feature of email that most people consider to be usable.  Some email clients (Airmail) have somewhat decent tools for doing Markdown, but many do not, or people do not know how to use them.

I haven’t used Discourse, but it looks neat.  Reminds me of Slack, which I use all the time.  My personal wants would be:

- Decent formatting tools (would be especially cool if it knew how to syntax highlight Ruby)

- Searchability

- Discreet topics

- Some way to make sure I can still sort of get “push” notifications of new topics the way that I do with email.  Maybe this isn’t true for everyone but for me personally if I don’t see questions that I know how to answer amongst my regular email flow, I tend to forget that the mailing list exists until I need to ask a question of my own.  In other words, I’d want to make sure it had a way to coerce knowledgable users to actively participate.

If Discourse isn’t to everyone’s liking, what about something like a chef-only StackExchange?  Would that work?

-- 
Eric

On November 25, 2014 at 8:06:13 PM, AJ Christensen ( "> ) wrote:

It's possible to interact w/ Discourse via email. I've used it for
forums for MMORPG guilds before. Works OK. It's nice having markdown,
sticky posts, surveys and the like.

Not sure how it would work on this kind of scale -- how many active
subs do you have to the ML? You'll need to run Discourse somewhere :-)
You don't have to run GGroups.

cheers,

--aj

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 1:55 PM, Tyler < "> > wrote:
> (I don’t know anything about discourse, so it may not do this) What if it continued to operate like a mailing list? IE, you could still send mail to reply and receive mail when other people post. If Discourse did that, would that fulfill your purpose?
>
> I would like a better UI for searching. And if we switched to something like Discourse I could see tags being useful too.
>
> -T
>
>> On Nov 25, 2014, at 4:44 PM, Phil Dibowitz < "> > wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 04:39:38PM -0800, Adam Jacob wrote:
>>> And just moved all of our conversation over to Discourse?
>>>
>>> http://www.discourse.org/
>>
>> Please no.
>>
>> Mailing lists are great for technical discussion... where you want to do
>> things like use 'vim' in your email client, suck in code snippets, format
>> nicely, etc.
>>
>> --
>> Phil Dibowitz ">
>> Open Source software and tech docs Insanity Palace of Metallica
>> http://www.phildev.net/ http://www.ipom.com/
>>
>> "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter
>> and those who matter don't mind."
>> - Dr. Seuss
>>
>