Is thunderbird and gmail a good option to use the digikam mailing list ?

[Dan Dascalescu]

Since you guys are continuing the discussion here about mailing lists vs.
forum, I will let slide the accusation that I've hijacked the thread, and
answer here.

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 1:48 AM, jdd <jdd at dodin.org> wrote:

> Le 26/01/2017 à 10:44, nonobio a écrit :
>
>>
>> to add to what was said on the subject, it's pretty easy to follow a
> mailing list on a smartĥone, and very difficult to do the same on a forum -
> I often have passwd and characters size problems in forums with my (5"
> android) phone


There are TONS of bad "forums" out there. Let's not talk about "a forum".
I'm talking specifically about Discourse, which is developed by the same
team who has developed StackOverflow. Discourse has excellent responsive UX
on smartphones, and you only type your password once and stay logged in - I
don't get this misconception that you need to log in and out all the time
that someone else complained about.

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 2:10 AM, Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 12:25:48PM -0800, Dan Dascalescu wrote:
> >    You wouldn't have this problem if we used [1]an actual forum.
> >
> I (and I suspect a few others) wouldn't be here if it was a forum.
>

You assume (wrongly, I'll go into that below) that there's no email option.
Anyway, for each one quasi-luddite who wouldn't be on a forum, there would
be 10 users who WOULD join. I'm not sure many folks here realize, but the
average software user is NOT like us. It's a similar problem to what I've
faced as an engineer at Google: teams believe they're the typical user, but
they're far, far from the average - highly skilled, Internet veterans, with
enough time and patience to deal with bleeding edge software etc. If you
think at scale (and have the data), you quickly realize that the conversion
rate for a signup form is around 1% (if you're lucky). That gets much
better if your community supports OAuth, so the user can *optionally* login
with their Google/Twitter/Facebook/GitHub account if they want.

digiKam-users doesn't even have a search page, for crying out loud. There's
Nabble, but the search is shitty, as I pointed in my other thread, which if
this were a proper forum I would link to - but guess what: on a mailing
list, the concept of linking to a different thread does not even exist!
What am I supposed to do, dump the other thread to a text file and attach
it?


> E-Mail has, for me, huge advantages:-
>
>     It comes to me, I don't have to open my browser and log in the
>     forum.  I'm on 60 or so E-Mail lists, if these were all forums I'd
>     be spending all my time logging in and out.
>

Why would you need to log out?

And Chris, I find it delightfully Ironic how given your convenience of
having all these threads arrive in your inbox, you missed my very recent
thread where I *volunteered* to create a proper, modern forum for digiKam,
and explained how Discourse can be run in mailing list mode, so those who
love email can stick to email (and those who want email notifications for
only some threads, particularly those they've subscribed to, can do just
that - again something nearly impossible with mailing lists, unless you
consider the crude digest options, which still require scanning through all
the threads).


>     I can filter the incoming mail so each list ends up in its own
>     mail folder.
>

So can you filter the emails from any Discourse forum.


>     I can use the editor that *I* want to use to create and edit
>     posts, I use the same editor everywhere and don't have to remember
>     different commands for different lists.
>

I'm sorry, but what fancy editing features (or commands?) do you use with
this mailing list? Does it even support any formatting? What if you wanted
to attach a screenshot?

Discourse has a standard Mardkown editor, with live side-by-side preview.
It's the same Markdown formatting used everywhere -
photography.StackExchange, GitHub, Slack, Trello etc. And if you insist,
you can still use vim and copy/paste your message into the forum or email
it, as I've previously explained
<https://meta.discourse.org/t/setup-incoming-emails-e-mail/42026>.


>     With the mail client I use the messages are properly threaded.
>

Can you share a link from one thread to another?

Can the community contribute to content curation by starring/liking posts?

Can a post be edited collaboratively so it becomes a wiki article to
up-to-date, authoritative content?

Can you summarize a long topic? (example
<https://meta.discourse.org/t/install-a-plugin/19157>)

What happens if you want to access a discussion from somewhere else than
your particular mail client? Or point someone to a discussion?

How about new people who join and don't have any existing discussions? And
don't tell me they'll bother downloading the archives - 99% won't.

And I could go on an on but those who are resistant to change, are going to
be resistant to change, no matter my rational arguments. It's a matter
of individual
mindset <https://hbr.org/2012/09/ten-reasons-people-resist-chang>.
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