Email Lists

[pidgin at alexoren.com]

On 2022-10-06 12:53, David Woolley wrote:
> The problem I'd have with pidgin as anything but pure email format would be that it is very low volume.  I don't like web sites being able to intrude, with notifications.

I fail to follow.  If anything, a web forum is /less/ intrusive than an email list, as you have better control over notifications.

> Typically, what I find with support forums, is that the people making one time appearances, to ask a question, prefer forums, because they are fashionable, but those who stick around and answer tend to prefer mailing lists.  However both mailing list and forum camps can have a serious amount of religious fervour.

I prefer forums because they make it easier for me to find what I am looking for, even when it is questions to answer.

> The risk with forums in high volume cases, is that they fragment, because lots of people want to own their own forum.

That may be true for purely social ones, but there is little reason for technical forums to fragment.

> Even if mailing lists fragment, you can use mail filters to put them back together, albeit you still run the risk of the same question getting asked on all of them, and the complete answer being spread across them.

Pidgin is not that popular so there is little risk of its support forum/list to get anywhere close to "high volume".
(Compare to, say, Red Flag Deals https://forums.redflagdeals.com - 1.9M threads, 30M posts, 1.3M registered users.  Imagine managing that in a mailing list)

I would even say that the fact that Pidgin doesn't have a discussion forum more accessible to new users is more than a contributing factor.

Fragmenting is also not a risk, since the people will go where the developers are to answer their questions.

If Discourse can provide the mailing list experience to some and a web forum experience to others, I see it as the best compromise.