[Overload-sig] Issue tracker vs. real-time chat

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jun 21, 2016, at 12:02 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

>I think we should definitely be seeing what we can do to improve the
>mailing list experience. :) I've not worked with Mailman 3 myself yet but
>it sounds like 3.0 is a pretty significant improvement. I was pretty
>curious about Posterious particularly, although I didn't manage to find an
>example of it online. Is there a good example to look at?

I'm too overloaded to read all of overload-sig right now, but I just wanted to
quickly mention a few things re: MM3.  You can see several live examples:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/
https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/

The Fedora lists are probably the most extensive; they have fully ported all
their old MM2 lists to the new software.  We have just a few lists on the
mailman3.org site (hosted on python.org infrastructure).  Mark Sapiro has
been working on putting some MM3 lists on python.org but there are a few
Postfix issues to work out when hosting MM2 and MM3 on the same domain.

Two things about MM3 that I think can significantly improve engagement with
mailing lists.  First, you don't have to actually be subscribed to post to a
list.  Hyperkitty (the archiver) has a way to post replies which show up on
the list.  So if you land on an interesting message via search, you can jump
into the conversation right away.

Second, but longer term, is porting the Systers dlist (dynamic lists) feature
to MM3.  At a high level, think of it as nosy-for-mailing-lists.  One of the
things I love about Roundup is the ability to easily nosy myself in to any
issue I care about and ignore everything else.  dlists allow you to do the
same thing and Systers has been using an MM2 implementation of it for many
years.  This is farther off because we do need some resources to get the
feature fully ported and landed, but this will be much much better than the
topic system in MM2, which has proved too cumbersome to see widespread
adoption.

What I like about the combination of these two features is that you can use
the medium that suits your level of interest best, which of course can be
fluid.  You get the best of forums and mailing lists, and can use either or
both as your needs change.

Cheers,
-Barry