[TxMt] Re: Actual Forum?

[Alex Ross]

On Jul 30, 2008, at 3:02 PM, podperson wrote:

> This isn't a "software project" it's a "software product". Not  
> everyone
> interested in TextMate wants to hack on it.
>
> Also note that the people "voting" on this topic are self-selected  
> to be
> pro-mailing list since the pro-forum folks have given up OR are  
> using a
> different product.

This is true.  But let me say that I've also noticed than the quality  
of discourse on TextMate's mailing list is very high.  The same is  
true for ##textmate on freenode.

> Mailing list says "pre-web mentality".

I think that this isn't true.  Basically everybody on this particular  
mailing list have grown up with the web, do we have a pre-web mentality?

People still use mailing lists be they are more convenient than forums  
for some purposes. Especially for those who follow multiple lists or  
those who follow a single list for the long term.  New messages are  
delivered directly to the mail reader, you don't have to keep checking  
web page.

There are plenty of ways to deal with mailing lists.  For instance,  
you can trivially set up a filter in every email client i've used to  
redirect mailing list messages into their own folder.  You can set up  
rules to flag messages you might be interested in.  As I type this, I  
see that Hamster has suggested a bunch of other ways to deal with  
mailing lists, some of which are not even possible on a forum.

Forums are terribly inconvenient for following discussions.  You have  
to continually come back to the webpage to see if their are any new  
posts (unless the forum emails you when a new post occurs, but what  
does that remind you of?)

> You're right, you don't need "another account" to use a mailing  
> list, you
> just need to vomit a spurious copy of the entire thing into your most
> important account. That's like saying you don't need a library card if
> you're willing to build on an annex to your house and have a  
> dumpster load
> of books stuck in it every day.

It seems like you don't hate mailing lists, you just hate their  
implementation.  I can agree with you there.  It would be beautiful if  
mailman supported per-thread subscriptions and had a built in forum  
interface.  But it doesn't.  wouldn't it be awesome if you could  
submit a message to a mailing list without having to first register,  
and then be automatically subscribed to the new thread?