Re: Improving productivity of internals mailing list

On 18 September 2019 18:33:19 BST, Dan Ackroyd <Danack@basereality.com> wrote: ># Problem 2 - Some threads are not a good fit for a mailing list. > ... >We should move as many conversations off the internals list as we can, >while still retaining ways of people finding where those conversations >are being held. > ... >For example, it's appropriate for people who are release managers to >be sending as many emails as they need to, to manage the release >process. People who have only recently joined the mailing list, >probably shouldn't be sending as many emails. I notice that in several of your recent messages, on and off list, you identify the *number* of messages to the mailing list as a key problem. While it's certainly true that this can be quite a high-volume forum, I think we should be making that volume easy to work with, not trying to reduce it as an end itself. One of the points in your proposed etiquette guide is "you don't have to reply to every message". I think there is a corollary, "you don't have to read every message". For instance, if a proposal or question leads to a series of back-and-forth clarifications, those should be visible to anyone interested, and easily skipped for anyone not. However, the current platform perhaps makes this more difficult than it should be. Although I'm subscribed using a Gmail account, I access the list mainly through Thunderbird, display posts in a tree view, and regularly leave individual messages and whole sub-threads unread, even if I'm actively participating in a different branch of the same thread. Other clients make this much harder - GMail's "conversations" are optimised for linear exchanges between two or three people, and are frankly awful for working with a mailing list. Although initially resistant, I'm coming around to the idea that the mailing list should be replaced with some other kind of forum. One of the key features would be good support for branching threads, ideally including the ability to move messages which have drifted away from an original topic into their own top-level thread. Notably, GitHub PRs fail to meet this requirement, as was clear in the recent experiment. Like Gmail, they're built for a very different task. On a final note, there are definitely times when people do send too much to the list, but it's generally not the volume itself that's the problem, but repetition, lack of clarity, or lack of focus. Better support for threads or topics wouldn't solve those, but it would solve the common case of "this part of the conversation isn't relevant to me but I want to read the rest". Regards, Hi Dan, -- Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]