Re: Discourse

[David Kastrup]

David Santamauro <david.santamauro@gmail.com> writes:

> Since we’re airing grievances …
>
> The format of the response below is exactly what bothers me most about
> email lists and why I favor forums. The etiquette is to quote what you
> are responding to and remove everything else. Imagine 4 other people
> quoted different parts of the original email, I now have 5 disjointed
> emails going off, perhaps, in 4 different directions. With a forum,
> topics can be split and merged retaining all parts of OP’s initial
> post/email and I can ignore the tangents I’m not interested in.

That seems more like a deficiency of your mail client than of the
principle of mail.  Mails include reference headers used for threading,
and my mail reader (news) arranges mails just like it does nntp (Usenet
et al) postings.

> Secondly, a forum only notifies you when you are part of a thread
> (either started or replied to one) which reduces the email traffic
> tremendously. You aren’t poked with an email every time someone has a
> thought or issue, rather, you instantiate the interaction with the
> forum. Yes, I know digest option is available, but really, who wants
> to wade through an entire month’s worth of emails in one shot.

Again, this points more to a deficiency of your mail client than
anything else.  Automatically sorting list mail into corresponding
folders should be easy enough.

To be fair, I usually read the LilyPond lists via Gmane's nntp mirror.

> Thirdly, from a practical workflow perspective, I would much rather
> scroll through a thread that is on one page than to click n-number of
> emails. Of course, having to click into multiple emails is due in
> large part to my first point.
>
> … and I’ll probably get yelled at for top-posting as well ;-)

>From a practical workflow perspective, I would much rather do all of my
reading using a single keyboard driven interface and application than
have to keep hopping through all-different web interfaces for everything
I am interested in.

-- 
David Kastrup