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Comment by codinghorror | Hacker News Reader

We really want Discourse (http://www.discourse.org) to get to a place where we have extremely robust 100% open source mailing list support -- we now have reply via email, notify via email, and community contributed submit topics via email. Working on attachments via email this week.

It's interesting -- unlike forums, people really enjoy mailing lists. I don't think I've ever met anyone, ever, who said they liked forums. But mailing lists seem to inspire people.

I want to see a long term hybrid model where you can interact nearly completely via email, or a good, modern web UI that YOUR org owns (not google groups or yahoo groups). This should be supported.

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Forget forums. Forget mailing lists. Bring back NNTP, so we can just point people at com.mycompany.engineering.infrastructure and not worry about setting up another lame inbox filter.

to be honest.. i would like NTTP back as well.

it solves all these problems decently well. i hate mailing lists, because they're not that efficient to use, and that includes the google ui to stuff (and gmail for that matter).

http://forum.dlang.org is an NNTP forum. You can also access it via newsgroups news://www.digitalmars.com/digitalmars/D or even a mailing list at http://lists.puremagic.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/digitalm...

It works out quite nicely for us.

I love the DLang forums. They are so damn quick!

Wow is their forum software open source/freely available?

I love how snappy they are.

Sure: http://forum.dlang.org/help#about

I don't think that particular genie can be put back in the bottle.

I'm a big fan of NNTP, though I haven't used it in years.

Sadly, I think that culture and clients are likely to sabotage this. Usenet worked pretty well when it was a handful of marquee tech firms and edus using tin or gnus. Similarly, email list work pretty well when everyone's using pine or mutt, understands threading, and uses postfix response format.

The worst mess I ever saw was a list that mixed entertainment industry types with techies, using a wide range of email clients, and featured a lot of people who really liked the sound of their own voices (talked, and wrote, far too much). It was all but impossible to follow discussions, threads were utterly mangled, etc., etc.

So I'm not sure Usenet can continue to work, on a wide scale (not to mention most people don't have a client installed). Though one can hope.

I think a lot of people understand postfix response format. but top-post because they think having the newest content at the top, rather than having to scroll, is better.

Yes- the top/bottom post debate is probably older than netscape.

It would need some form of voting, distributed moderating support (including UI in clients), html posting/images and advertising to be a real alternative for most forums though. NNTP is much better than web forums but web allowed people to add features ('innovate' shudder) much faster than a 'set standard/get clients to update' cycle can.

Actually I think where Discourse is going is the same place Microcosm is going.

The software is just an intermediary that connects people having discussions and collaborating.

The first version may well be a web forum.

The second version may well be an email interface / mailing list.

The third version may well be native mobile apps.

But all versions work all of the time and people should be able to connect around their shared interest regardless of how their interface preference might divide them.

In that regard, you have the usenet dream of people picking whatever client they love, and there's little reason NNTP can't just be one of the available interfaces to the underlying swirl of discussion and collaboration.

I agree that NNTP is nice, it is however lacking some features that forums offer these days. Ideally there would be a push to a new version of the protocol that adds these features (and more such as using hashcash to combat spam).

You don't need anti-spam measures if your newsgroups are internal. :)

When I was younger, I loved hanging out on forums. There was perhaps a more robust community feeling, since forums can have multiple sections, and include off topic and chattier discussion without people complaining about being deluged with mail. Avatars and signatures let people express their personality and made it easy to tell the author of a post.

Then again, to some extent I'm just nostalgic. What then was personalization I might now see as a rather low post text (signal) to metadata (noise) ratio...

I spent a lot of time in high school on PHPBB systems. I find it less attractive now, using mostly IRC plus some forums, though I don't frequent them enough to be a "regular". I absolutely hate subreddits - I generally find specific enough ones to be of low quality compared to the equivalent forums.

I also absolutely love Futaba-style imageboards - it's a great blend of anonymity, simplicity, and community. It's a shame 4chan's reputation is what it is.

Most of the problems you'd want to avoid could probably be solved if you get rid of the images, and required people to sign up but still post anonymously.

Granted, then it's no longer strictly an anonymous imageboard but in a lot of cases, the images don't add to the discussion anyway.

Well, why do you need anonymity, then? Might as well display names by default.

I disagree with getting rid of the images, though. They are a useful tool, and most forums feature some sort of attachments. attachments that add nothing to the discussion are a culture problem, not a technical one.

> Well, why do you need anonymity, then?

One example off the top of my head: Because some of us would like to put it to productive use and discuss technical work-related stuff without a possibility to link it back to our employer?

I think it's useful to not necessarily have to link your posts to your account if you don't want to.. anonymity from other users and anonymity from the staff have never been the same thing anyway. A lot of the problems on sites like this (HN, reddit) stem from their focus on chasing after and maintaining reputation, which itself can encourage an echo chamber and a sense of elitism. Having an account would make it easier (not necessarily effective, but easier) for the staff to deal with systemic abuses, because you have something more persistent than an IP to deal with.

Anonymity often encourages trolls to come along and inject horrible comments as it is, allowing posting without creating an account would just lower the barrier to such posts - it's not fun for a moderator to have to deal with that (I've dealt with such for about 12 years now).

You could require creating an account and posting through it, but still not show that account to other users. Although then trolls might just create new accounts. It's not an easy problem to solve.

People are happy to leave horrible comments whether or not they're anonymous, have a pseudonym, or are using their Facebook account.

What's important is if there's an active community encouraging them to do something better. (This is different from just stopping them from doing bad things.)

I'm where you are. IRC and twitter together work well for me.

Forums are still one of the best sources for narrow topic specific discussion. I frequent several (advrider.com being the biggest) and the topic divisions keep off-topic discussion to a minimum.

advrider.com ++. Really is great for adventure motorcycle riding. If you just pay attention to popular TV you'd think you have to be some sort of film star to ride around the world on your motorbike. Then you read some of the Ride Reports there and go "Holy hell! Lots of people are doing it"

I love forums. I am not crazy about forum software or the inconsistencies between different forums, and often wish for a reliable interface I could use to manage my subscriptions, like an NNTP newsreader or used to do - there are a few mobile solutiosn because many forums are so awful on Mobile, but not many desktop based ones.

I always found mailing lists a pain in the rear to be honest, because the content is usually surrounded by all this auto-generated administrative cruft in addition to the administrative interface of the mail reader itself.

I love what you're doing with Discourse but I wonder if there sin't some selection bias going here.

>unlike forums, people really enjoy mailing lists. I don't think I've ever met anyone, ever, who said they liked forums

I bet if you asked people if there were forums they liked, you'd get a different set of responses.

Forums do seem to be generally less popular than they once were, though, probably because a lot of the functionality they used to provide has been folded into social media and blogs with social logins.. just plain forums on their own might seem a bit atavistic to someone who grew up in the age of facebook, youtube and whatever the new thing is i'm too old to even know about.

I think they've been largely replaced by reddit. Autonomous subreddits aggregated into a single feed instead of separate global subforums, upvotes instead of bumps (that also serve to self moderate), threaded conversation instead of quote trees, reddit is basically just forums adapted for scale.

And I would argue that that is why Reddit sucks so much (personal opinion - I can understand why someone might enjoy the community there, but I do not in the slightest).

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the news aggregation feature, but the community aspects are terrible. The benefit of forums was primarily in their segregation of a small-but-active community. Reddit works in precisely the opposite manner, so you end up with boring, repetitive, least-common-denominator tripe. Any subreddit small enough to avoid that is too small to be worth the time - it seems that small communities (by which I mean actual communities, as opposed to random conglomerations of people with vaguely similar tastes) tend to have other sites and methods of communication they frequent, such as this one.

I think that the poor scaling of forums is their greatest strength, and Reddit is an example of what happens when forums do scale.

I like forums, there.

Also, FWIW, I hate mailing lists (although recognise they often hold high value information).

I love forums and hate mailing lists. There just isn't enough functionality in mailing lists, and I end up feeling spammed.

Also, Reddit and HN are basically forums.

Reddit is a forum, and I love it.

Quora is a forum, and I hate it.

I don't think I've ever met anyone, ever, who said they liked forums.

Hacker News is a forum.

And a lot of people's biggest complaint is that HN does not notify you of replies to your comments. I use HNNotify to inform me of replies but it is not perfect. The big problem with HNNotify is that it also emails you top level comments for every story you submit. A less frequent complaint is that you can not collapse threads. Neither are an issue with mailing lists.

I would guess this is deliberate to discourage flame wars.

did you get some age statistics on that? I really hate e-mail, mailing lists etc. I was thinking that it might be a conflict between the generations because I am a bit younger than the people I used to see on the mailing lists.

Do you use gmail?

The client (or provider) has bugger all to do with it. I'm old and cranky, and have hated mailing lists since I was a young 'un. Properly-threaded, searchable forums (preferably locally-replicable) are better in every imaginable way. Plato was able to do it sometime back in the early Devonian; Iris/Lotus (whether you like the Notes client or the default app UI or not) made it easy and distributable in the late Cretaceous. The parts exist to make it workable with FOSS and an open, less-astonishing UI, both connected and local. Neither familiarity not ubiquity is an indicator of quality or suitability, and email threads are just about the worst format that can possibly be forced into service in this sphere. That email was once, for all practical purposes, the only available choice doesn't make it the best choice.

I'm on several mailing lists, and the client I'm using shows the threaded discussion and search works fine. I get to use a real editor and not what Firefix/Safari/Chrome/IE provide in too little text areas (like now).

yes. But it's more like I'm not interested in stuff forever. if for a few months I use a lib, and wish to send a patch or something, then life move on, I change job, I replace the lib, etc. I have to subscribe, get spammed, find a way to unsubscribe filter the thing etc. Whereas on the web, I decide when I go reading and if it's not relevant to me, I don't go anymore and that's it. Nobody cares if I put my answer over or under the citation, and anyways, if anything has already been said before, they will tell me to read the ML history which lies... on the web, where it belongs in the first place.

It would be really nice if you could make Discourse more nice and usable without Javascript: http://i.imgur.com/Jml22Hg.png

I see no reason to use JS for a simple forum like webpage just like I would see no reason to use HTML in mail.

Given that Discourse is an Ember.js app at heart, I wouldn't bet on that anytime soon.

Another (late) voice that prefers forums over mailing lists.

One argument about what that I haven't seen so far in this discussion is that I can go to check the forum whenever I want (and not go for a couple of days if I decide to) whereas a mailing list is more like a push model where you receive the emails no matter what, even if you can't take care of them for a couple of days.

I have to say that I have very little experience with newsgroup though, so it might be a best of both world, but let's face it, it has becomming almost inexistant.

Don't know if I really am going to be the first guy, but I (vastly) prefer forums to mailing lists. I also don't like IRC.

I think I'm a weirdo, though. Or a web-head.

I have a question to all those of you who wrote/will write/think that they prefer forums to mailing lists - I've just picked you randomly to reply to as I don't want to spam the thread with the same question:

Which mail client do you use, and have you ever used a mail client that supports an easily accessible threaded view, like mutt? Or have you ever used a Usenet news reader, like slrn?

I really don't like web forums and very much prefer mailing lists and NNTP, because it gives me a unified interface for all the different lists and newsgroups with very low UI latencies and powerful functionality for dealing efficiently with huge discussions.

That's why my hypothesis is that many people who prefer forums do so because they have never seen/used a good/powerful mail or news reader, and only ever have used mailing lists through some webmail interface - which indeed probably is a lot worse than web forums, especially if it's high volume. So, I am asking you to provide some data to check this hypothesis against ;-)

Like one of the posters above mentioned, forums have multiple subsections. As an example let's say the forum is about animation, I can read Japanese animation section and ignore the Spanish animation section. With a mailing list it's all or nothing.

4chan is a forum, neogaf is a forum, gamedev.net is a forum. I think they all work much better as a forum than a mailing list.

I think mailing lists serve a different need/style/purpose than forums.

How is that different than being subscribed to debian-spanish@l.d.o and not subscribing to debian-japanese@l.d.o? Or subscribing to debian-devel-spanish@l.d.o and and not subscribing to debian-devel-french or debian-devel-portugese?

For one it's easier to browse without committing. If there happens to be no new topics in Japanese Animation I might read Spanish Animation and if I want, reply to a topic. With N mailing lists I have to commit to the entire list rather than just individual topics in subforums. In other words I have to subscribe to the "Spanish Animation" list rather that just one topic inside.

What dfc said, but other than that I think that is more an argument for usenet than for web forums? At least the "subscribe" step tends to be better integrated with newsreaders than with MUAs, so it's easier to subscribe to a whole bunch of groups. But on the other hand, subscription tends to be only a small part of the overall experience, so I am not so sure it really matters all that much.

Yes, I have tried such clients. I'd say NNTP > forums > mailing lists, because I don't want to spend time writing inbox filters or the like. Email is for a very different purpose than forums, and I like having separate accounts for both. (NNTP, meanwhile, is dead - I'd have to pay for access, and the communities just aren't there any more).

Yeah, the filtering setup indeed is more complicated than necessary, I guess a more streamlined process for that would be nice (the whole aubscription process, that is, like some URI scheme that would invoke a "subscribe to mailing list" function of your MUA, which would initiate the subscription, set up the filter, configure the list address as a subscribed mailinig list (for Mail-Followup-To handling)?).

On the other hand, once you have one filter setup, it usually isn't that difficult to copy and modify it for a new list!? And signup is a one-time thing, after all. But two-click subscribe certainly would be nice and shouldn't really be all that difficult to do.

(Edit - sorry, forgot the second part of my answer, so here it is:)

Usenet is not dead, though quite a bit less alive than it once was ;-) - but no, you don't have to pay, there are a few free news servers, if you can live without the binary groups, for example:

http://www.albasani.net/index.html.en http://www.eternal-september.org/

(Those are read/write, you can find many more public read-only servers)

I believe that eternal-september.org provides free access to newsgroups. As for the communities, it really depends on the newsgroup. Some of them are still relatively active.

I use Thunderbird as both my mail and news client. It has a threaded view and adequate filter/killfile capability (though not as sophisticated as some other newsreaders that use a score based system).

> unlike forums, people really enjoy mailing lists. I don't think I've ever met anyone, ever, who said they liked forums.

I think it entirely depends on what the purpose of communication channel is serving.

Mailing lists are transient passive participation. I can sign up to a list and never have to do another thing because I use email all the time. Occasionally a back and forth discussion might pop up, but I can easily choose to ignore it by simply glancing at the subject line.

Forums are persistent active participation. I have to specifically access the forum, possibly logging in in the process, to see what activity has happened. Many do enable some kind of email notification with a set frequency. Digest emails lose the benefit of the quick glance decision to attend or not, while all activity would be similar to the mailing list model. As forums can encourage more silo-ed conversations or short disposable responses, getting all activity is generally not ideal, however.

I love forums. Their layout and functionality make a lot of sense to me.

I like mailing lists quite a bit, but consider them a barely adequate substitute for an NNTP group. The biggest advantage is that brain-dead email clients can't break the threading, a close runner-up is that you don't have per group policies WRT reply-to munging, all groups work the same in your client of choice.

I really like discourse's vision , but I wish that the plugin ecosystem will get some more activity. I recently tried to create a simple plugin but stopped it due to my limited knowledge of ember.js .

Doing plugins right is hard.

My philosophy is also that 90% of what you would want to do with plugins should be built in, anyways.

I'm the opposite - I love forums, hate mailing lists. Mailing lists clutter my inbox, while I can browse forums to my heart's content without it intruding on my personal mail.

The joelonsoftware forum seemed to be well liked. It had the feature of unthreaded comments which made it harder to sustain pedantic bickering and off-topic tangents.

Off topic, but do you keep a list of sites using Discourse? I really like the software but have yet to run into it anywhere besides your demo site.

sort of, http://www.discourse.org/buy has the official 3 early beta partners. Those are solid and mature since they've almost been around a year now!

In the last 3 months we went from 500 Discourse forums to 1500+. (We screen out the obvious test installs with IPs for names, etc.) We're about to take the brakes off as we get to V1.0, I have been reticient to really encourage people to launch new Discourse sites while we are in beta. But it's speeding up as we get closer. Open source FTW!

We don't have a public directory of all Discourse forums -- we do internally, since everyone pings us for versioning, but I have been hesitant about exposing it until we're clear the community is OK with a public directory.

Some already using it in the wild include:

- bbs.boingboing.net - discuss.howtogeek.com - discourse.ubuntu.com - forum.greenheartgames.com - discuss.atom.io

I love my online friends, and I hang out with them in a forum. A mailing list serves a completely different purpose to my mind.

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