Religious war Forum vs ML

[Simon Frei]

I took the liberty to address your finishing statement first to get that
topic out of the way:

> In my book (and I wrote this in the very first answer in this thread)
> the question ML vs Forum has lots to do with personal taste, preferences
> and working style and less with technological superiority.
>
> And (I repeat myself) this is the stuff religious wars are made of.

100% agree. This discussion started completely on the wrong foot - now
rational arguments and mutual accusations keep the balance resulting in
an unconstructive discussion. I hope we can get back on track by
refraining from any kind of judgement and leaving "superiority" in
whatever aspect out of the discussion - refer to (potentially
subjective) advantages and disadvantages.

>> 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.
> [stuff about additional benefits of Discourse deleted]
>
> ...but we only marginally agree w/r to the virtues of Discourse.
>
> <private opinion>
>
> To phrase it positively:
> Discourse seems to be "as good as it can get" as forums go. In terms of
> useability it still falls short by a considerable amount when compared
> to a ML.
>
> Some time ago quite a few german Freifunk communities moved from ML to
> Discourse for exactly the reasons you stated (and possibly some more).
> Having followed those communities for some time I tried to follow suite.
> To cut a long story short, I'm no longer following that community.
>
> In my book even the mailing capabilities of Discourse aren't remotely
> close to what an ML offers.
>
> </private opinion>
Can you please give some explanation what the pitfalls were that you
experienced?
Discourse mailing capabilities without configuring specially to work
just as a ML is not optimal indeed. However when I last tested using a
configured forum as ML (for the user: one checkbox to tick) I got
exactly the behaviour of a ML (as far as I know it, I am not aware of
any "special features" of MLs). So if you don't want to use any of the
"forum aspects", you don't have to.