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

[Boudewijn]

Hi Dan,

Thank you for your insistence and elaborate argument! I'll join the hijacked 
thread, I prefer the title over the '97-reference (good year though it may be) 
and top-post to do away with all the benefits of using email anyway. 

I tend to prefer mailing lists for the previously mentioned reasons. Some 
mailing lists switched to a hybrid forum/list offering, where I quite felt 
that email was a second best choice. Discourse sounds ... promising.

digiKam runs on the KDE-infrastructure which is somewhat of a valid argument 
against switching: now there is a volunteer (you :-) )for setting up an 
alternative, but next year time might be lacking (or the year after). Of 
course there will be many more volunteers by that time, but imagine that is 
not the case. 

Do you think there is a way to make an email-bridge between the KDE mailing 
list and a separate discourse instance? There would be a hyper-active DK-
mailinglist member "mailing via discourse" on this list, and a very well 
informed "mailing via DK-users" member on discourse. 

My reason for joining the thread: I share your view that a well integrated 
forum would allow many more people to share and enjoy digiKam. 

I got interested enough to have a look at the FAQ[0]; it mentions, among 
others: 
 There's no super secret special paid commercial version with better or
 more complete features. Because Discourse is 100% open source, now and
 forever, it belongs to you as much as it belongs to us. That's how
 community works. 
and:
 (Of course, there is technical and social friction to change in any 
  established community. Engage in discussions with your community about any
  such change well in advance.
 ) 

With best wishes and hopes for a fruitful outcome one way or another,

Boudewijn

[0] https://www.discourse.org/faq/

On donderdag 26 januari 2017 12:46:34 CET Dan Dascalescu wrote:
> 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>.